F1 Ultra Engraver

The F1 Ultra Engraver/Cutter by Xtool

This is a small bed, super fast, low power laser engraver and cutter. It will quickly etch the surface of wood, acrylic, or metal. Given enough passes it will engrave and even cut thin materials. Our more powerful lasers are better for cutting wood and acrylic. This laser excels at etching.

Settings

Powder Coated Aluminum

Good settings for engraving powder-coated 5052 Aluminum from Fabworks (for labels on an electronic enclosure):

• Power = 100%
• Speed = 500mm/s
• Pass = 2
• Lines per cm = 300
• Mode = Bi-directional
• Freq = 30KHz
• Advanced:
  • Engraving angle = 90
  • Type: Incremental
  • Cross hatch: OFF

lines/cm

When engraving, don’t assume that 300 lines/cm is slower than 200 lines/cm. I noticed that when I made an engraved square (just for example) using xTool Studio, it defaults to 200 l/cm. Surprisingly, 300 l/cm actually results in a LOWER estimated time to engrave. It would be interesting to see if this is real, or a bug in the time estimator….

Tips

Optimize Time

Auto Planning scans across each object from top-to-bottom, and left-to-right. Doing it this way results in a LOT of wasted time while the beam is being moved around with the laser OFF.

There’s a setting in Process (click the chevron just to the right of “Process”) called “Processing Path”. Change that from “Auto Planning” to “User defining”. Then, you get access to a new switch called “Smart”. Turn the Smart switch to ON.

In Smart mode, look in the path planning preview, and we can see that it no longer spends a lot of time moving the laser around when it’s off. The laser is on almost all the time, and it’s only off when it does a fast move to a different section of the design.

In one file, that reduced the estimated total burn time from 15 minutes down to about 2.5 minutes, a factor of 6 (!!) faster.