Hi there,
Has anyone tried to engrave anodized aluminum with either laser module of the H2D? How well does it work? Thanks!
Works really well. The business cards you can buy from the Bambu Lab store are made of anodized aluminum.
So far, I’ve engraved quite a few of them, along with a large number of bottle openers and keychain tags.
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Are you using the 10W or 40W?
40W but even 10W should be able to do light jobs
Anodized Aluminum engraves really nicely. Even 10W should do a fine (albeit slow) job.
There is a huge variety of anodized Aluminum things you can laser. Business cards, dog tags shaped like bones, hearts, circular tags, you name it. Amazon is the place to shop for these things. You don’t need to buy blanks from BBL.
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True, I got most of my anodized aluminium stuff from Amazon, way cheaper than from BL Store.
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Thank you all. Does engraving aluminum emit any kind of fume?
Yes, engraving aluminum can generate some fumes or particulate matter, particularly if the surface is coated or anodized. While bare aluminum generally produces minimal visible smoke, fine metal dust and vaporized particles may still be released, depending on the laser power and processing speed.
To ensure safe operation—especially in enclosed or poorly ventilated environments—adequate ventilation or filtration is strongly recommended. This may include an external exhaust system or an air purifier equipped with HEPA and activated carbon filters.
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The stuff from amazon is ot varied quality. I have gotten great stuff, and I have also gotten tiny things that looked bigger in the pictures, as well as coin blanks for my fiber laser that claimed to be brass but were actually brass coated steel, so that when I engraved through a very thin costing I was engraving steel, or “copper” blanks that had a thin coating of copper and were mostly zinc underneath. The copper was so thin that it came off in patches in the unengraved area when the coin was polished.
And I have gotten great brass blanks that were brass all through, engraved great, and pokished perfectly.
So, read the user comments on Amazon before you buy,
I have other lasers. I got the H2D so that I could use the drag cutter and pen. Only time I would use the laser would be to take advantage of the uneneven surface ability.
One thing that interests me - the laser has green glass. Most lasers that are blue visible diodes use amber glass which cuts the blue just fine and lets more visible light through. This glass looks like it is narrowbanded in the visible spectrum above blue, which means that they could give us a near infrared laser (low power, not a fiber, just a couple of watts), or, if they really wanted to kick the competition in the ass, a low power ultraviolet laser. Every bandwidth laser has something it is better at. Blue visible lasers are not good with glass, you need coatings and such. Plain stainless needs a coating for sny but shallow markings. Near infrared works well for metal, poorly on wood. UV lasers seem to engrave everything but can’t do metal carving like near infrared lasers can. CO2 lasers are lasing in the far infrared, and can do a great job on clear acrylic, cutting thicker plywood, and so forth.
But a 5 watt UV laser on s gantry would make them a market leader.
With a fiber laser I can make black letters on shiny stainless that are formed when the metal partially oxidizes. With a diode laser I can give that same dogtag a tiny spritz of Cermark, and the laser will melt the cermark and make letters that look almost the same and are tough.
But you put this tag on a dog, you need other tags. Where I live I need two tags by law and then there is this owner tag. They jingle, rub each other. In a year of jingling, the cermark will scrape off. So will the black oxide. Under the Cermark will probably shiny metal, while under the oxide will be gouges where the metal was removed and turned into oxide.
The business cards that people call anodized, I think are painted - they may be anodized, but you can typically see machining marks through pictures of color anodization, so I think that there seems to be a paint layer above the possible anodization. I think that this plaint layer is what is burned off when you make a metal business card.
There are lots of processes where painted and powder coated items have paint removed with the laser. One guy on facebook spray paints slate in several colors (in layers) and then makes color images by burning into the layer he wants to expose. If someone knows better about the cards great but I think that they are painted.
There is nothing wrong with paint, it just is not anodizing.
How precisely can you control the size of the engraving? Let’s say I want to engrave a metric scale on an aluminum piece, Is it easy to make it accurately sized, especially given work pieces of various heights?
You can’t really engrave objects that are different heights, because the laser needs to be focused for the top of the surface being engraved at the start of the job. I don’t know if any laser cutters that will refocus mid-job for a different Z height object.
As for the accuracy of the engraving, it’s as accurate as the mechanics moving the laser. Since that’s the same mechanics that move the extruder when printing, it’s a safe bet the accuracy of an engraving is no better or worse than a 3D print.
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Well… that is actually possible.
xTool has it on their P series: 3D Curve™ Engraving
Bambu will add this in a future firmware update: Contact-less 3D Mesh
More and more lasers will map a curved surface and automatically change z height to follow the curved surface, ir at least that is what the ads say, but engraving non-flat objects was supposed to be a feature of the H2D’s laser. Haven’t tried it yet, I’m busy making stupidly complicated openSCAD programs to generate toys.
It doesn’t compensate for curved surfaces. I accidentally engraved the end of a bottle opener, which has a slight curve, and it’s clearly visible that the laser went out of focus in that area.
Currently it’s static, they said 3d mesh is coming sometime 