Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

I don’t necessarily like or enjoy talking about da wimminz, or da society, or da breivik, or da vegas shooter, I do it because I have to get it out.

I’d *like* to be given a TV channel job and be told to make a series of 12 programmes, each 60 minutes long, each on a subject of my choosing, I’d start with electricity generation and distribution and consumption, synchronisation, power factors, etc… your lives literally depend on this shit people, wake up and learn something about it.

Viewing figures would probably be in the low thousands…lol

So this one is a subject that I like, lasers.

I’m not an expert, I just own some and run them and make some sort of living from doing so, and it’s all my own hands on so I’m not some removed management type.

This first image plots various substances and their reflectivity vs wavelength.

The red arrow is the 1 micron wavelength of most fibre lasers, and the blue arrow is the 10 micron wavelength of CO2, and you can see right away for most of these materials 1 micron is too long, too much reflectivity, you’re going to be much better off with a 355 nanometre UV laser.. more detail in this second image.

You can see here that at 1 micron Aluminium is only about 92/93% reflective,

so you can work with that with a 1 micron fibre, but Gold Silver and Copper are still pretty much perfect mirrors at 1 micron.

Of course it matters what we are talking about, and these graphs all talk about pure materials, and that means you’ll probably only ever find pure gold and copper and silver in things like electronics, so forget ideas about etching copper pcb tracks with a 1 micron beam, you want a 355 nano UV beam for that.

It also means the chances are that the impure alloyed versions of copper and silver and gold that most people will hand you *will* mark with a 1 micron fibre.

You still want to be *careful* with this shit and make sure your work is off axis so nothing gets reflected back up into the beam source, but the fact is you probably can mark most gold jewellery, most silver cutlery, most copper plumbing fittings, because none of those things are pure.

Of course you are now presented with a whole new set of challenges, communicating some of this to potential customers in a useful way.

“Yeah man we can probably engrave your gold jewellery, because it probably ain’t pure gold, if it was pure gold we couldn’t”

“What, you’re saying this fucking expensive piece of bling ain’t pure?? fuck you… whaddaya you know about it anyway, you probably don’t even know what you’re talking about and you can’t afford nice bling shit like this anyway… fucking loser…”

ummmmm, no, ummm..  ah well…

Though I say so myself I have a very clear and very informative business website, complete with FAQ pages and a blog, and I explain quite clearly such things as a laser being a beam, not a tool, (as in physical tool like an end mill) so you’re never going to get precision Z axis machining out of it for example, and it is going to react to different materials differently, different parts of the same piece differently, and different batches of the same thing differently.

I will still get at least one potential customer per week talking to me about printing, they want Fred’s name engraved in black on a piece of wood or leather etc, and I have to point them at one of the aforementioned web pages explaining it is not ink, it is a beam of thermal energy, and many things determine the colour of the final work, and almost none of them are under my control.

Others will ask for things that they think look nice, not things that they should be asking for, I want a sign like this one, dude, that sign was made in two separate processes, 1/ it was engraved and 2/ the engraved areas were filled with paint, we only do laser engraving and cutting, you can paint fill it yourself…. OK, how about annealing.

If I listened to customers, with every other job I’d be adding a complete new process to the repertoire, and within six months 5% of what I would be doing is laser engraving and cutting, and if I was going down that road I’d be farming out my laser engraving and cutting requirements to someone else.

Just this morning I have been cutting shapes with the fibre galvo from household kitchen foil that is 0.03 mm thick, the problem isn’t cutting these small shapes, well it is, the outgassing from the cut blows shit around,  the problem is picking them up without damaging them… the hexagon on the right (image should be a link to full size png) is 5 mm across, you can see the edges of the letters are distorted with the outgassing of the aluminium being vapourised by the beam energy, so clearly there is a lot of playing to be done there to get that right, but as a proof of concept, it works… BTW later on in this test I engraved / ablated an area to the right of this without going through, just some local thermal distortion.

That will be next the request if this was a client job and not a home experiment / learn / study job, can you engrave it without thermal distortion please….. yeah well, maybe I can minimise it buddy, but it is basically a beam of heat, sooooo…………

Of course down at the atomic levels where we can be (with this particular beam source and this particular f-theta lens and so on) putting 12.5 kilowatts of coherent 1 micron radiation down per square millimetre of work you’re not just melting or vapourising, you will also be making charged particles, so you have a whole new set of factors to content with…

With the same beam source and a different f-theta lens I could go down up a peak 87.5 kilowatts per mm square.

When you consider noon day sun in the tropics high up in the atmosphere on a clear day solar radiation is giving you about a kilowatt per square meter, we are talking around 90,000,000 the energy density.

I can cut 0.5 mm 305 stainless quite cleanly, if you can live with the thermal discolouration, just by making repeated passes each one about a micron deeper than the last, so suddenly we are looking at the ability to texture the surface of metals and make hydrophobic finishes.

You can see this sort of thing just by going to youtube and searching for “fiber galvo laser” and you’ll find a ton of videos, most of them made by the chinese, most of them showing an open machine in class 4 mode with a bunch of people stood around it with no eye protection of any kind, trusting to luck that there won’t be a stray beam reflection…..

At 10 microns the CO2 laser will cut acrylic, and cut clear acrylic and leave a polished edge, at 1 micron the fibre source won’t touch acrylic, or many of the organic materials such as wood or leather that the 10 micron CO2 thrives on, just one logarithmic step in wavelength makes all the difference and to the human eye it is all invisible infra red anyway.

At 1 micron the fibre source will directly mark / anneal / engrave most metals that the 10 micron CO2 will just bounce off.

Change the PRR frequency of the beam to higher levels and instead of engraving / ablating  / cutting the metal, you end up cleaning it of rust and other dirt and imperfections, interestingly the metal part itself is warmer to the hand , less off the applied energy is burned off as ablated material, so more of it is absorbed into the body of the metal.

Again it’s not perfect, you don’t get a clean polished / brushed / fly cut surface finish, you can see imperfections where the rust / mill scale / etc was, but it feels smooth and clean and certainly all the rust and dirt has gone, or in the case of alloy all the oxides have gone.

Ten years ago all this shit would have been so far out of the reach of the single small businessman that it may as well have been science fiction, now it’s available for the price of a new taxi.

But, it is all still firmly in the realms of a primitive technology, it’s not mature or polished, there is a lot to learn and master, and most of all a lot to just accept, because you can’t do fuck all about it.

One of these things is the perennial I/O issue between the machinery and the PC, in the home the now ubiquitous Canon print driver engine takes care of everything, in your phone the Broadcom chipset takes care of everything wireless, when it comes to industrial equipment, especially newer stuff, not so much.

Plotters are now fairly mature, so steppers and controller are all fairly mature technologies, and frankly they are precise enough and fast enough for >98% of plotter laser applications, you can make it work.

When it comes to galvos not so much, of course they are newer to the scene, require much faster response times and much more precise levels of control, you’re looking at full excursion in one axis of the order of 0.03 seconds, and you are looking at a resolution of the order of 200,000 points along that excursion, so you’re knocking on 7 million separate instructions per second.. my current Mach3 install for the cnc mill and separate linear motion table for the fibre tops out at 100 kHz.

So you’re probably going to face a choice of scaps controller software / drivers / mainboard or an ezcad controller  software / drivers / mainboard, or you bought some proprietary in house wank.

Scaps drivers won’t talk to an ezcad controller and vice versa, so you start comparing the two, and you see it ain’t that simple, it’s apples and oranges, and in an ideal world what you want is a hybrid of the two.

Then of course you’ll get all the marketing wank, people will tell you that you must have MOPA to get colours, I didn’t buy a MOPA because I didn’t see the need IMHO that particular roundabout and swing, but as you can see from the image on the right, I can produce colours just fine.

The problem comes when you start to talk about “colour” the same way we talked about pure gold and copper and silver above, they aren’t real pigments, just annealed discolourations, so reproduction and uniformity are a thing you’ll struggle with, and trust me, you will fucking struggle, because the moment you mention it some cunt will want pantone colours putting on some metal.

It is all slightly reminiscent of todays story in the register about Uk Home Secretary Amber Rudd being annoyed at techies who sneer at people like her because she doesn’t understand encryption, but still things she can legislate it, she has never heard of King Canute.

Nor will most of your (potential) customers, but that’s OK, *I* have the lasers, *you* want stuff lasered, guess whose rules we will be playing by?

A freedom that I only have because I saved up and bought my shit for cash, it’s mine, it can sit there all day doing nothing but cutting out tinfoil hexagons and it will still be mine, nobody can repo it.

But as a tool and as a toy it is a great thing, I strongly suspect that a year from now I will still be learning, because that’s the kind of guy I am, I did not buy it hoping to get contracts to engrave 10,000 promotional pens at a time and nothing else, I bought it to play with and experiment with, and sure, I’ll rent out machine time on it to anyone who asks.

This shit keeps me alive, keeps my brain working, keeps me interested and alert, I am fucking six years old and I have never grown up, and I have no intention of starting any time soon.

And this is the stuff I really like talking about.