Thread: Laser or CNC?

I have spent 2 years running a commercial CNC mainly doing cabinet work etc. 5-15mm wide by 10mm thick would just be shrapnel on the machine I use, it would just blow them off the table and all around the factory as it cut them through, assuming that the dusty foot did not suck them up.
We use a 3/8 compression cutter as our normal cutting tool, but also have 3mm, and 8mm endmills and a 3/8 single flute for plastics permanently mounted. With the 3mm bit you have a min 1.5mm radius for internal corners, and probably max 1mm DOC per pass to minimise bit flex, so a lot of passes to cut through 10mm, but the big isssue would be holding all of the work down on the table for the duration of the cut.
Only way i could see that happening would be to glue the job to a sheet of 3 or 6mm MDF, but the glue job needs to be reversible but very strong. Our machine uses 2 x 10HP motors to provide a vacuum bed 2.4m x 1.8m and another for the extractor working through a 75mm opening with an ER32 collet (about 60mm) working through the middle of the opening.

Lasers burn. That is how they work.

A CNC router type machine will do the job, but they are limited on their inside radii.

Although it sounds counter intuitive; it may be that a water jet is your best bet. This will slice straight through steel or cake.

I have both, cnc and laser. Neither is really suitable for your needs, but the cnc router would be the preferred option of the two,

Cutting 10mm deep whilst mainting tight profiles would be slow as you would need a small cutter and the small cutter is limited to approx 1/3 dia to depth of pass per cut, so very slow

My cnc router does 12mm deep cuts through mdf in one pass

@malb - yes I can see there are challenges in using routing for small pieces but I've found at least one company who specialise in this sort of thing and can handle it.

@Bob Williams - Water cutting sounds amazing but the only people with the machines that I've been able to find so far are aluminium fabricators and therefore not set up to handle wood. Do you know anyone who does?

@simso - I haven't had any cutting priced as yet so we'll have to see how it goes - could be way out of my league!

Is the job intarsia or inlay in nature? If so is it visible from just one side? If the answer is yes then maybe you could do some tapered inlays on a cnc router ie. the pocket and the inlay have draft angles and the inlay is held together by either the use of a thicker board (not fully cut thru or a carrier as Malb suggests) the front surface is planed down after the parts are glued together to reveal the design.
This also solves the sharh corner issue and avoids small cutters ie faster

200+ is not going to be cheap depending on the complexity.


Cheers

Mark

Hi all!
I'm actually after some help with laser cutting MDF as well - I seem to be able to find plenty of threads about where to get it done etc....... but I'm in a slightly different situation.
I have access to a 2.5 kw laser cutter which we use for cutting out saw bodies at work, and would be very interested if anyone on here could possibly give me any pointers on setup...... I'm guessing it'd be a fair bit different to cutting steel? If anyone could give me some help on what I'll need to do differently that'd be great! I'll probably be wanting to cut 12, maybe up to 18mm mdf, also maybe some melamime laminated stuff if possible?
Cheers!

Hi sawguy and welcome to the forum.

May I suggest that you start a new thread as the title of this one is nothing to do with what you want.