Laser Lines Marks Code On Tiny Area Of Oil Seal
Laser Lines has recently marked a 10-character code on the outer ring of a customer's oil seal. At the 10.6 micron CO2 wavelength, rubber materials mark very well, but the unusual aspect of this mark was the size of the mark area on the outer ring: it measured only 1.25mm (0.049in) high. The marking set-up consisted of a Synrad laser, FH Flyer marking head and the Synrad Winmark Pro laser-marking software.
The FH Flyer head was equipped with an 80mm focusing lens that provides a 116-micron spot with a 0.8mm depth of field. To create legible text marks, the rule of thumb is that character height should be a minimum of seven-to-ten times the focused spot size. For this application, the character code was 1mm high, which is on the low-end of the range for an 80mm lens. To create this mark, the 'Simple' stroke font was selected, a text height of 1mm was set, 0.15mm of extra character spacing was added, and a text radius of 54mm was entered to match the curvature of the seal.
On the marking tab, power was set with a duty-cycle percentage equal to 10W; a velocity of 1016 millimetres per second was added, and the mark-passes property was set to four. By making four complete passes, the rubber surface is vaporised slowly in small increments, resulting in a cleaner, more distinct mark. The characters are well-formed; the engraved 1mm-high text can be easily read without magnifying aids. This small 10-character code, with four mark passes, was created in a cycle time of only 0.13 seconds per part.
The FH Flyer head was equipped with an 80mm focusing lens that provides a 116-micron spot with a 0.8mm depth of field. To create legible text marks, the rule of thumb is that character height should be a minimum of seven-to-ten times the focused spot size. For this application, the character code was 1mm high, which is on the low-end of the range for an 80mm lens. To create this mark, the 'Simple' stroke font was selected, a text height of 1mm was set, 0.15mm of extra character spacing was added, and a text radius of 54mm was entered to match the curvature of the seal.
On the marking tab, power was set with a duty-cycle percentage equal to 10W; a velocity of 1016 millimetres per second was added, and the mark-passes property was set to four. By making four complete passes, the rubber surface is vaporised slowly in small increments, resulting in a cleaner, more distinct mark. The characters are well-formed; the engraved 1mm-high text can be easily read without magnifying aids. This small 10-character code, with four mark passes, was created in a cycle time of only 0.13 seconds per part.
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