I stumbled across this video that claims laser engraving on reflective stainless steel could causing damage to the printer.
The round fobs from Bambu look very reflective. Any insight from Bambu on this?
So far, I have only been engraving matte stainless steel and no issues so far.
Only the laser comes with 2 dog tag samples that are highly reflective. I have not used those yet though.
A black coating couldn’t hurt in my opinion. However would add to dirt and debris in your printer.
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I havnt seen any issues. The second the laser hits it, its no longer reflective. Maybe if it was a perfectly flat mirror, I could see there being possible issues.
Also, the way the beam works, there is a focal point. Outside of that focal point/cone, the beam becomes too weak to do much damage to solid objects. This is why its hard to engrave things that arent flat. And also why the printer etches from the same distance each time. And also why the laser doesnt melt itself
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I think they chose blue laser for this reason, it goes out of focus pretty fast and should not be able to cause damage for unintended surfaces (except your retina, and camera sensors, of course, but that’s because they both have a lens (your eye and the camera lens) to focus more light than it’s supposed to be there).
Think it in another way. People are generally complaining the laser being not strong enough and not being able to process some other materials effectively… So damaging the printer seem quite unlikely.
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It can most certainly damage the laser head. But it’s unlikely to.
It’s not actually removing material, or even melting it. When you hit Stainless with lower power laser light it causes oxidation that results in a color change due to something called “thin film interference”, where the energy level of the laser dictates the resulting color. And the energy that goes in to changing the metal is absorbed by the metal, not reflected. So quite a bit less laser energy is left over in the reflection to do any damage to the laser head.
If you were lasing something that didn’t react to the light, simply reflected it, that’d be a problem. That’s why I can’t run copper in my CO2 laser, copper is highly reflective for the frequency of light my laser emits. The reflection would burn out the focusing lenses in the laser module.
Some very good points in the comments.