benchtop CO2 laser

Standard laser cutters are super useful to have in your lab, making all kinds of plastic thingies, glue together, etc. But they also do a fine job at making panels. We have a 35-watt Epilog. At one time or another virtually everyone in the Institute has come by to use it. If your panel is black plastic (with a white inner layer, to show lettering), the laser can make the connector holes, etc.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

boxes

Cheapest way is to place a recess in your cases and cut laser labels to affix within the cavity.

That way, you can burn an entire array of the labels at once, instead of having to mount the enclosure of each unit individually.

The labels come with a tan or grey matte finish on Aluminum and the laser burns that to a dark brown or black matte lettering. You can also burn your logo into it. Data matrix mil spec application compliance is easy at that point as well.

There are also label stock of plastic media that have a black top layer to burn off yielding an underlying white base. Also mil spec acceptable.

We had a 30W and a 40W benchtop unit. You will also need an air handler to remove the burn dust and it needs to filter it out before it spews the air back into the room or elsewhere. Our bench base was the air handler/filter device.

What I saw on Amazon, you could get 50W real cheap.

The better brands are more though because they give you more control over the feed rates and power levels, etc. And there is also the resolution of the gantry head. If too rough everything looks bad, especially if you add a data matrix or your logo. So watch out picking the cheaper knock-offs of the real stuff.

I think we could load an array of the anodized boxes into the laser and start it up. Come back in an hour or two and they are done.

We can buy that box blue anodized from Hammond. Paulo did a red one too, which some people like, but I think it's a little showy.

We have a solder smoke extraction system, with filtering, for our production benches. We could vent into that.

Thanks.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Depends on your enclosure size and the array size of the laser gantry bed. They are usually not all that large.

But I do not know what your chassis size is.

Also, if you do burn a dat-matrix for say a mil job, then if it fails, and many do, you are suck with a failed burned box.

If you indent or mill a spot for it and apply the label, you can always reburn a failed label cheaply.

Also sometimes there is a typo, so even sans items like data matrix, ther can easily still be failures that would be far more costly.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

You have self claimed high end products, but you are so cheap that you cannot even design and implement your own enclosures?! Wow.

Stupid and cheap. There has to be a hundred custom Al extruders in your area. Your stuff could look so good, and have better connector mount points and conduction cooling capacity for your designs.

Truly sad that you are so cheap over a few dollars difference, when your image would be bettered by an order of magnitude.

Or why would you even need to switch from cheap polymer labeling to laser based? Permeability? Better reason for the recessed mount pocket and hard label.

Good thing you do not need to be TEMPEST level shielded. I have doubts you could ever get there if you were required to do so.

I cannot believe that you get to mention your products and FANUC together.

Hammond... sheesh. Toy lab.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

You still need an extractor of high cfm at the laser, and it needs a filter, and THEN you can port the exhaust over to the other ductwork.

They sell bases just for this purpose and it is not optional, unless you want to increase your chances of getting cancer or a pulmonary disease.

That blue box in my pic is about 2x3 inches. We do a lot of those. The next one up is about 5x4.

Removing a label would be a nuisance. The boxes aren't expensive, and we rarely have to re-label them.

We buy a commercial extrusion cut to length. Is something wrong with that?

We've sold over 12,000 of the small box products so far. People seem to like them.

One product has sold 3612 so far. The design took a weekend. I did another two over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The alternative to knowing how to market is to design a lot of stuff so that some of it might sell.

FANUC just got sold. GE wrecks most everything it touches.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

No. You said you bought hammond cases.

Sad.

tirsdag den 10. december 2019 kl. 22.44.12 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@decadence.org:

why does it matter if Hammond cut the extrusion to length or someone else did it?

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Another retarded remark.

FANUC is old. I'll bet they still made a bunch on the remnants.

GE is great. One of the highest technologically advanced manufacturers in the world.

John Larkin wrecks every aspect of truth he touches.

Yes. We buy them directly from Hammond. We've bought four different lengths so far.

They saw them, so the lengths aren't exact and sometimes the ends aren't precisely a right angle. But extrusions aren't precision stuff anyhow. We could machine the ends exactly, but it works well enough.

They were once, until the bean counters took control.

We love GE. They acquired and destroyed three of our VME competitors.

Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

OK, a COTS encloure on a product supposed to reside at the "high end" of the industry.

I am having a hard time assigning credibility to that.

Image is everything, and a few buck more per unit for a nice enclosure goes a long way toward image.

If you're removing the anodizing, the exposed aluminum will get pretty gnarly looking over time.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I guess we could leave one on the roof for a while and see. It's the rainy season.

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Bwuahahahaha! ANOTHER distortion!

Extrusions are seldom flat, or accurate. Extruded Heat sinks often have to be milled flat to get good thermal contact.

How about this as a replacement for the extruded Hammond boxes? Being able to easily pop the top off, to get at the board, would be great.

It would be anodized sheet metal, easy to have fabbed in quantity. The shaded things that hold everything together could probably be machined from some alum bar stock, not even a custom extrusion.

Here's the next obvious iteration.

This gets rid of PCB mounting spacers, which usually wind up in the middle of circuits.

We'd have a bare-gold strip of copper along the sides of the board, in the usual keepout area, crushed against the sidebars with some #2 screws. Heat transfer and grounding would be awesome. No spacers or PEMs required. One could remove the top of the clamshell, or the bottom, for easy PCB access.