laser engrave boro?

[nicko0]

can boro be engraved by a laser engraver?

does it need to be a special" laser engraver?

[Milkman]

Not sure exactly what kind of laser, but motherships's percs are cut /etched with a laser. that's how they get the geometrical patterns

[nicko0]

cant find a good pic of there perc

[themoch]

you need a pretty strong laser. we did it at AGI one year, and a regular laser engraver did soft glass no problem, but even turned up all the way we had to make like 4-5 passes before we could see anything, and then the glass was so abused at that point it started surface checking.


you need the strongest one you can get, i think over 5 watt? maybe it was 500 watt... can't recall right now.

Gray Matter would know.

[EFS]

Laser engraving looks like shit on glass. Sandblasting is a much better choice. Alot cleaner looking all around!

[Tzonis]

Not sure exactly what kind of laser, but motherships's percs are cut /etched with a laser. that's how they get the geometrical patterns

Any idea what power their laser cutter is?

Interesting stuff!
-Tz

[Pogo]

I believe Mothership percs are machined with an EDM, not a lazer.....
(electrical discharge machining, not electronic dance music)

[Milkman]

Im possible to be mistaken, thought that was the case. Either way some kind of voodoo goes into their design

[Bglass]

I run a laser at work and its 2000w. It can't cut Boro. But it can soft glass I've heard, etching mOstly. use it for metal strictly. To put it in perspective to get real detailed cuts and notches your looking at a 500k to a million dollar machine maybe a fiber mark?
Look up a epilog laser. They make te one that people use professionally to etch soft glass bottles and plates and dichro. As well as scoring for fused glass. Those are 5-30k. The highest wattage which is I think 40 or 50 watts. And you buy the turning arm for cylinders.
I can tell you that from my expeirience working a industrial laser for 2 1/2 yrs If i were to throw a sheet of Boro in our laser to cut or etch it would look like crap. And it's a 250k machine.
But a water jet is a whole other story and can probably do what your thinking and way way more. They're them now with articulating heads so you can cut bevels and angles in nearly any material pretty clean up to 10" depending on the machine. I've seen props cut out of solid 10" steel with the rotating head.

[Greymatter Glass]

Clear glass of any type cannot be cut effectively with a commercial laser cutting system, certainly not with a <100w desktop laser engravers you commonly see in mall kiosks etching cell phone cases and such.

I was with Andrew at AGI when Mike brought his laser... the best we were able to get was a very splintered and rough ablation of a few mils (that's thousandths of an inch) on clear boro, and black boro didn't fare much better.

As for the Mothership percs, I can't say what they use as I haven't seen them in person. I have seen the Hitman percs, those are done with a water jet cutter, which some people may mistakenly call a laser, but it's not. It uses high pressure water and an abrasive (usually garnet) to cut the glass. You can get cuts very thin and precise, almost as fine as a laser with a new nozzle and enough set-up calibration. Once it's cut you can fire polish or acid polish them, and they're ready to rock... but before you all rush out, it's not something you can do one-offs for cheap. Set up is usually $250-1000 and then they charge per minute of run time....I've had quotes from $5-20 a minute - and those machines are slow, maybe 1-3 minutes an inch on fairly thick sheet glass running slow for precision? Starting (piercing) takes a long time too, so it'll add up.

I would suspect the Mothership percs are water jet cut. You can pick up a used machine in good condition for $90-200k on ebay right now...

-Doug

[Matt P]

I believe Mothership percs are machined with an EDM, not a lazer.....
(electrical discharge machining, not electronic dance music)

still... I enjoy picturing them cutting there percs with electronic dance music...

[nicko0]

bahahahahhagha

[nicko0]

wow thanks for all the info.

so.... ultrasonic welding might count as edm ????

[nicko0]

as for electric discharge machining.. that look expensive and complicated

[nicko0]

going to make new thread now.

diy water jet cutter.

[Pogo]

Great thoughts Doug. You may be right, Don't know why I wasn't thinking water-cut.

After looking at more pictures of hitman and the like's percs, I've been thinking about directly machining boro with traditional CNC means... I wonder, If you could relieve the shavings well, could you run a high speed endmill of some sort (diamond plated) and cut paths? All the pieces I see could be made on a 3 axis machine.... Whatcha know, Doug?

[brian falls]

I know there are companies that machine quartz....not sure about boro

[brian falls]

I know the owner of California lasers. They manufacture láser equipment and are a high end laser welding job shop. I asked about boro and he as well suggested an epilog. There was another company he suggested as well but the name I forget.

[Greymatter Glass]

Sure, you can machine boro with diamond tooling....

You'd have to have crazy good filtration on your coolant pump, or else it would get wrecked by the silica in it as you grind down the glass.

It would just be a matter of calculating the paths so they don't try to take off too much material too fast, same as any material.

There are also ultrasonic mills made for milling hard/brittle materials such as glass and ceramics. Sonic Mill is here in Albuquerque, I've talked to them about cutting glass in their machines, just need to come up with a few tens of thousands of dollars to get it started :P

[standard28]

There are lasers that can cut clear glass. The semi conductor quartz glass industry cuts quartz plate all day with lasers. I've seen it and worked with it personally. We would cut discs out of 4-5 mm plate to make large diameter discs 200mm+ that would be held welded to the end of a 200mm+ tube. It gave the flat bottom a perfect wall thickness and optical qualities. The cool thing was it was hooked up to a cad, so you could cut whatever you wanted. We played around and did a few things, once we did bart. Came out great. The problem with lasers are they are using heat to cut and it creates microscopic cracks. Boro couldn't take it but quartz could. We would have to firepolish the edges before we started though....

[standard28]

Also in the semi conductor industry the have all types of cnc lathes and mills machines that do all types of glass. Most was quartz and from solid ingot chunks. All of our flanges and discs were cut from ingot. Quartz threads are machined unlike boro that are molds. The molds used in boro threads couldnt take the heat quartz needed so quartz threads are done on cnc lathes...