Max feed rates on PRO

CNC Machines Shapeoko Pro
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Anyone have any ideas on max feed rates for the Pro? This is for laser engraving.

Playing with a trial of lightburn and I can think of 2 strategies:

  1. Engrave each letter at a moderate speed, possibly lower acceleration. There will be a lot of direction changes in a small space, so lower speeds/accel needed to keep the quality.

  2. Engrave the entire word, line by line, top to bottom, with some overscan on either sides of X that will allow direction changes to happen outside the burn areas, and while it’s burning it’s moving at a constant (and hopefully more stable) speed.

I’d typically go with “as fast as you can go until you lose steps, then back it off a bit”, but perhaps someone has played near this threshold already :slight_smile: I have run adaptive cutting toolpaths at 3000mm/min, so for no load laser I am wondering about 4k, 5k, 6k…

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Laser test patterns using LightBurn

I recently made this test pattern and it’s super helpful to find the sweet spot. My tests were from 500 to 5500 mm/min.

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I think the travel speeds will be the limit, not the burn power, so I was curious from a heavy gantry point of view. I can do 2000mm/min at 10% power to get decent fill text.

Do you run at 5500mm/min? Any ringing issues from acceleration/decel of the heavy gantry?

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So now that I’m home looking at my palettes, I went from 500-5000 mm/min. I have the 2.4w JTech laser with a custom mount that sort of cantilevers off of my HD 80mm spindle (gen 1). Also I didn’t realize that the question was aimed at SO Pro; I have an SO3 XL with linear rails along the gantry.

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I think I have some configuring to do with accelerations the text was done at around 3000 mm/min if I recall correctly. The squiggles, I think, are from the mount rigidity (or lack of the necessary rigidity). I tend to run at 2500mm/min at 80%.

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I have run both SOPros at my disposal at 400 IPM (~10,000 mm/min) in soft plastics like HDPE with great success. That is the fastest that the factory grbl settings will allow you to go. So if you’re wondering pure “what is the fastest” I would say that unless someone is braver than me. :smiley:

2 Likes
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Okay I ran a pass at 4000mm/min, 50% laser power. Sounds like I got some headroom :slight_smile:
Overscan was definitely sweet. Happy that my laser mount is quite rigid as well!

Ahh, that sweet smokey aroma. I ran my dust collector which has a HEPA filter the second time. I don’t know if it helps much or if carbon would be more beneficial.

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