We have a 30HP screw compressor hooked to our 12,000 watt OREE fiber laser and we cut all the way up to 1/2" carbon steel with compressed air with a great, polished finished edge. You do need 240 PSI to do this but it's possible for sure. The compressor has a five stage filter with a built in dryer and this is important as well so as not to contaminate the lens of the laser.
Yeah as the thickness increases the pressure requirement increases.. We are doing thin sheet metal and have a limited electric service, so the setup we have is enough for practical use up to 2mm (14 gauge). We are currently running a 1500w source and have cut as thick as 1/4 inch (6mm) with compressed air, not that I would recommend anything over 2mm with this setup as the burr gets pretty thick.. And yes the filtering requirements are high, we have five parts to our filter setup so likely it is similar..
Thanks! I'm looking into a similar setup, but I cut 11ga. Thinking about getting a high pressure compressor to prefill 300 cylinders to 2400psi. I only run small jobs, so i have plenty of time to refill. I don't see anybody else doing this though.
Two and a half years ago I could only find one video of one of the machines actually being used.. I've been trying to fill in the gaps in information. The compressed air thing was a big gamble since everything I found said 300-500 psi was needed. We ended up getting an HPA tank to test the idea, and found the air requirements fairly reasonable. The whole setup shipped with taxes fees and the like was around $4500+ as I recall.. But its easier to flip a switch than to haul the tanks in for refill, and with airgas and their constant double and triple billing it was an easy to justify the cost.
Thank you very much for sharing your valuable experience, I have a 2000w IPG laser, do you think that it can cut 3mm of carbon steel and stainless steel with compressed air? And is the air conditioner important and make big difference in cutting performance?
Hi , thanks for this very useful guide here, Our machine is 500 watt max fibre laser cutting machine. our regular job is 2 mm stainless steel. our compressor is fs-curtis model seg 7.5hp 12 bar, 120 gallon tank, with refrigerant dryer and pre and post filters, 17scfm actual. will it be good for 2mm stainless steel (14 gauge sheet) can you make a 2mm ss cutting video.
How many CFM is needed to run your laser? I was reading were one user was suggesting that ~250psi and 70CFM would be needed for compressed air for the laser which seems crazy....?....
The compressor we have is 17 scfm and checking with a stop watch it shows that it is only compressing 25% of the time, so roughly 4.25 scfm.. And yeah I ran across the same numbers when I started to look into this, but for smaller machines cutting sheet metal the numbers are less crazy.. Really wish I had known about this early on, we spend a LOT of money on oxygen tanks from airgas over the two years we have been running our little 500 watt bescutter laser.. This really cuts the cost of laser cutting down from reasonable to dirt cheap. we have cut around 14,000-20,000 parts since switching, we wanted to make sure this actually worked in production before recommending it. And it is working great.. Check the other video we do a comparison cut on an "impossible test piece" and you can see just how much better air cuts than oxygen.
Hi, I am looking to get a 1000 or 1500 watt fiber laser in China. They keep telling me that I need a 15 bar or 220 psi 20 Hp motor compressor. I do not have 3 phase electric. I can get a converter, But was told that I need a 60 HP converter because of the hard start which is $7200 on top of the compressor cost. I only cut 20 gauge carbon steel. Can you please tell me is a 150 to 175 psi compressor will do what I want ? So I do not need to spend all this money. Thanks
So 20ga carbon is within range with what we show, we cut a fair amount of 20ga. Currently we are running a 1500w source on the same machine with the setup we show, 16 gauge does ok but has a little bit of edge, 14ga requires a little bit of sanding before tumbling. We did install 12mm tubing and added some larger valves to improve flow to the head, which allows us to cut 22ga with the gauge showing 125 psi with the air flowing.. The air compressor we show has been running very well for nearly three years now, probably payed for itself a couple times over. We have changed the intake filter and the oil, the other filters are still within acceptable range, however I should probably have changed them a year ago just due to age.
@@smallshoplasers8785 Thanks for getting back to me. I do have another question. I am confused as to getting an open table machine or closed. I cut with plasma now and that makes so much smoke cutting. Does the laser make allot of smoke with the exaust fan ? I just do not want to make an erra getting a laser and do not want to breath smoke. I keep getting told lasers with down draft do not make much smoke. Thanks
Most of the 500 and 750 watt units are made to use 220v power which is Line to neutral, if you are in the united states you can use a buck transformer to reduce the 240 Line to line to 220v, and then wire the machines "line" to line 2 and "neutral" to line 2, you will want to follow the wiring to make sure they don't have their grounds and neutrals crossed.. The larger machines would need three phase, which can be generated using a rotary phase converter and then using a buck transformer to adjust the power to the 380v they use.
