Perfect fitting laser parts by adjusting the Kerf in Lightburn
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- Опубликовано: 19 фев 2023
- Lasers are exact tools and can cut small parts with great precision. However they still have a width to the laser beam that can cause parts to have a little slack if you do not account for the beam's kerf. In this video I show you how to measure the kerf of your laser, and how to set up Lightburn to automatically offset your cut lines for perfect fitting parts.
You can download the box joint lightburn file here to help with your own tests: drive.google.com/file/d/1Ttyx...
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Thank you for sharing. Everyone stay safe, warm, happy and healthy. From Henrico County Virginia
Thanks for watching!
This worked a treat! TY so much.
I can't thank you enough for this video! I have been doing multiple tests on adjusting my kerf and found the results were all the same. I didn't realize none of my shapes were closed so the adjustment wasn't applied. You earned my like and subscribe! 🙂
Glad it helped! That's my main goal is to share knowledge that hopefully helps or inspires others.
Great video - very helpful.
Excellent video. Thank you.
great video!! learned a lot...THX 👍👍👍
Glad it was helpful!
Another easy to follow video! Thanks
Glad it was helpful!
Though I thought it to work this way this was a thoroughly explained confirmation. Thanks a lot 👍
Glad it helped!
Very detailed explanation!
Glad it was helpful!
Great information I had never seen! Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
Very helpful. Thank you.
Excellent lesson
Glad you liked it!
Once again sir, you get an A+ for your video. Thank you.
Very welcome! Thanks for watching!
Good explanation of kerf and how to dial in the perfect fit. Well done Steve. 👍🏻
Thanks 👍 I always enjoy making more helpful hints and tips videos.
Excellent tutorial!
Thank you!
Thank you. This was a terrific explanation.
Glad it was helpful!
Great job. Best explanation I’ve seen so far! Very helpful.
Excellent video, very informative, Thanks.
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks for this video, very useful and educational!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you! Very clear and usefull.
Glad it was helpful!
Good overview. Good point to measure both horizontal and vertical elements
It's extra important on the diode lasers that might not have an evenly square focused beam.
Much appreciated! Great explanation and help
You're welcome! Thanks for watching!
Excellent info, well presented. Thanks for sharing!
Glad it was helpful! Dialing in the kerf can really help get near perfect fitting pieces when it's needed.
Great explanation. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Best explanation on kerf and adjusting I have seen yet. Thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
Great tutorial, super easy to understand, thank you!
You're very welcome!
Best video I have seen on this subject. You made it easy to understand.
Glad it was helpful!
This was a very good and insightful video. Thank you
You're very welcome!
Well presented and clear explanation video. Well done and thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video! Simple but efficient. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
That’s a great tip, I was wondering about that 👍👍👍
Glad to help!
Thank you. This video was super helpful and easy to follow!
Glad it was helpful!
Great tutorial! Excited to give this a try later!
It's great to use when trying to get a nice fit on box joints or inlays!
@@Vintauri I do have a follow up question. Given that you mention that each material could be slightly different, does this means that you have to do these measurements every time you are working with a new sheet of material?
I have seen many people do videos on this topic, but yours is the easiest and best way I have seen. Great job!
Glad it was helpful!
Great explanation! Subbed
Thanks for the sub!
I too want to say thanks! Steve, it was great to view and follow through with the information you put out and to see it come full circle and work, wow, 😃thanks again
Glad it was helpful!
very helpfull and informativ, thanks for sharing
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you! I had seen another channel explain it but I wasn’t getting it. You made very easy to understand. I put in my save for later as I won’t remember how to do this when I need it. Thanks again.
Glad it helped!
Excellent!
Thank you very much for your clear explanation. Perfect video and am very happy with it. Going to work with it today as want to make some boxes. Also very happy with the "box joint" test file.
Glad it helped!
Excellent tutorial. I may have * known * that I would need to offset to account for the kerf but ... now .. I understand exactly how to do that. Thanks.
Glad it was helpful!
Awesome way to learn
Thank you! I'm glad it helps!
Steve, wow this video and your skill set is like a grand slam in baseball for me at least, thanks sooo much I was working with others methods but when it comes to snug fits your system worked. Thanks again happy holidays and a new subscriber as well.
I'm glad it could help. Understanding the Kerf and how to adjust for it can really help your items fit better. Thanks for watching and subscribing!
Great explanation and demonstration of kerf. I would also suggest new uses do an x and y calibration test in Lightburn before adjusting the kerf. Thanks for a great video.
UPDATE 3 Yea it came out perfect, again thank you for the video .0061 offset😁🛫
I’m glad to hear you got it dialed in!
Thanks for this video
Glad you found it useful!
Very informative and easy to understand tutorial. I’m a caveman learning this stuff. Been using XCS which is point and shoot. Just bought Lightburn seeing I need to figure out kerf adjustment for upcoming projects. I am a furniture maker primarily but side gig laser. Thanks and keep up the great work 👊🏼
I'm glad the videos are useful! Once you get comfortable with the laser I'm sure you'll find some unique ways to incorporate it's use into your work!
I have the Atezr 35w Plus. Thanks for the best real life calibration tool available.
The 35w Plus was a mess coming from the factory nothing was close to calibrated. After (no factory service support) much tweaking the machine is getting close to being great! I greatly appreciate the additional tips as well. A suggestion: This might be too product specific - how to close a circle when calibrating circles.
Thanks. Well done
Thanks for watching!
Awesome tutorial! Thank you. My laser is not firing right now but when I figure that out, I will definitely adjust the kerf for some of my projects.
I hope you get it sorted out so you can enjoy creating with your laser!
@@Vintauri thank you
Steve, very well done and extremely easy to understand. Good plug at the end of the video for your Sunday evening live event with Clack. BTW - I am still using your D1 enclosure that you put on Etsy; good solid enclosure. Thank you.
Much appreciated! I'm glad the enclosure is doing well for you!
Thank you so much! I have am new to Lightburn and wondering how to adjust the Kerf. Good explanation.😊
Very helpful thank you....
You're welcome!
Perfect explanation! Thank you. I was trying to offset lines... silly me. Beating my head against the wall. It started to click in my head, but I need you to say that you can't offset a line!
Glad I could help! Thanks for watching.
Thank you so much!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you!
You do a very clear explanation, as a Texas resident I don't use mm for size or feedrate (no sense in that) Not sure why people are doing that. I also do alot of this laser stuff in Vectric Vcarve Pro much easier since I'm not as familiar with LB and it's simply not laid out as well. Thanks for the video it's really good info for getting around in LB.
I'm glad it was helpful. I do jump between imperial and metric. I use imperial because it's what I learned as a kid and hard to break that habit. But metric is easier to scale and work with from both small to large dimensions, and when working with people all over the globe on various development projects I had to get used to it. I keep a small dual tape measure handy for quick conversions on the fly.
Thank you. Great video again. I love watching your videos. You explain everything in a calm way without a lot of fuss which you come across often enough. Very pleasant. What I wonder is how you make the fingers a little longer so that when the box is assembled you can sand off the black ends. Only needs to be half a millimeter ... I think.
If you are using Lightburn you could play with the slot resize tool to make them longer but that may not work in all scenarios. You can always use the node edit to move things out 1mm but that could be tedious on a more complex design.
@@Vintauri I will also purchase your box from Etsy soon. My laser engraver will arrive next week. I like the box very much. What happens when I scale up your box from 103 mm. to 103.5 mm.? I read at another video the comment of a guy who had scaled the box from 4" to 5" larger and problem was that the slots and tabs also scaled with it and there is a lot of excess material outside the box when assembling. Do problems arise at half a millimeter as well? My intention is to sand away the black laser edges then. And otherwise, like you, I should sand the edges nice and round but don't have as nice a beld sander as you do. Thanks
Then we won't do that.
Thank you so much 🤝👍🥇
thanks
Love the video and explanation. Would like to seen the pattern included in a link for us newbies. Also a link if posable to a kerf calculator if one exist. Otherwise great job.
That's a good idea, I've added a link in the description to my goggle drive to download the box joint kerf test file if people want to use it.
By chance, do you have a video talking about how to figure this out in XCS?
Great video, my question is; if you cut a hole in the middle of your square, would you have it on a different layer because surely you would need inward offset? Thanks
Great video! Thank you!
A question if I may. Is there a way to do the same thing in XCS?
Not that I know of, but they are always working on updates to the software so maybe it will be a feature added in the future. You would have to manually offset the files outside of XCS at this time.
Do we need to off set both sides ? Or can we just offset 1 side and just not divide the kerf we come up with. ? Oh and good informative video. Watched a couple were they were doing some many other things they never really show the kerf info plainly. You did. Thanks.
When I downloaded the Box joint file it shows up as what looks like assII code in google drive on my lap top, a bunch of letters and number. what file type should I save it as perhaps that help. Other wise and outstanding explanation as others have said. I appreciate showing the math on the table. just to confirm what I though I was seeing and hearing 😁🛫
UPDATE when I down loaded the html page to my down load folder It saved the box joint file as a lightburn file. i then imported it in to LB and It should up as expected.
IT is my first day with the new brain! thanks maybe this will help some one else. now off to make smoke and hopefully tight joints.
Will lightburn recognise what to offset in and what out? Ie. outer perimetres to the outside and holes to the inside.
Any videos for those who don't use lightburn?
Do you have a video doing an inlay? Say, for an earring, inserting acrylic onto a wooden back where you could drop the acrylic into the wooden base.
I've not done a video on inlays yet but I have a few ideas brewing!
Brilliant mate, really helpful. I’m using my lasers frame for a plasma cutter, so knowing about the kerf offset is very useful. In Lightburn, say I make a 50x50mm square with a 10mm hole in the middle, will the kerf offset automatically adjust to cut it correctly? The offset would need to be outside the square but inside the hole, to be correct with the drawing (I think) Hope that all makes sense lol
You may want to put the inside hole on a separate layer and tell it to off set to the inside vs the outside. Then do your outer cuts after that.
@@Vintauri Makes sense, forgot about layers. Thank you 👍🏻
Does lightburn allow for different x and y offsetts ? I've seen lasers with significantly different x and y spot size ....😮
Lightburn only has one kerf offset option. I've seen some with differing x and y spot size but were also talking about a difference in hundredths of a millimeter. For anything I'm doing with these diode lasers including inlays, averaging the kerf offset between the two gives me tight enough tolerances. If not, I'll go back to CAD and manually adjust lines in each axis.
So most of the stuff I work with is either 1/16th, 1/8th, or 1/4 width. Should I do a separate test for each one or will the kerf offset for the 1/8th be a decent middle ground for all of them?
The 1/8” will be decent for the various thicknesses of the same type of material, but I’d recommend a test when switching to day acrylic or foam.
I dont use lightburn (only Corel Draw is available), but I recently bought some blueprints where none of the parts fit together. How do I increase kerf or otherwise make the pieces fit by creating space?
You would need to use an offset tool in your design software. Generally you need to move the line to the outside of the design by half of the laser beam. For pockets or slots you would move the line inside the line by that amount.
Hello I'm a newbie in laser machines. I have a diodize laser and I just wonder how can I control how deep i want to remove the material in wood. For example I need a 3mm deep or 5 mm deep,etc. So I can cut another type of wood and exact match. Please help.
It's going to be tough to have a very exact depth of cut with a laser. You can play around with engraving settings to try to get a depth but as youre working with natural material that is not consistent, it will burn at different depths. For exact depths that do not go all the way through the material, you'll want to look at a CNC Router.
Good Morning. In seeing that there is a significant difference between the x-axis measurement vs. the y-axis measurement, in this example, should we consider the step pulse setup in the controller? If it were mine, I'd see if there is an adjustment, like GRBL, to adjust so that they are close to the same on a side when asking for a square. Not saying that's how you get to an inch, saying that subtracting out the kerf, they should measure very close to the same X vs. Y. This is not to take away from your execellent subject content and delivery.
That is assuming the beam is square. Many diode lasers have a rectangular shaped beam so there will be a difference in your x vs y lengths even if your steppers are calibrated for movement.
Ahh, hadn't thought of that
Can you direct me to a place that will te me what laser power I need to cut 0.5mm brass sheet
Perhaps you have done this with low powered devices doing several passes??
The wavelength of diode lasers will not cut metal other than very thin stainless steel. You'll need to look at a fiber laser or a high power Co2 laser to look at cutting metal.
What is the point of starting and calculating kerf with inches if you are gonna end up using millimeter in the end? Was it just to illustrate conversion?
With the majority of the world using metric and many machines and software defaulting to it as well, I try to use both units to get people used to the conversion.
Thanks for the information. When the caliper said 0.9965, etc. why didn't you round up to 0.997? You said 0.996. Just curious.
I opt to start a little snug by rounding down to the lower number. At those numbers and working with soft natural material the thousands of an inch will not matter that much.
@@Vintauri Makes sense. Thanks.
2nd Update 😒 I am using 1.5 mm Plywood trying to tighten in the kerf. I have made multiple test with Kerf off sets from .139 mm to .152 mm I am not seeing any difference between the cuts I would think that at least one would be so tight they would fit together. I am seeing a visible gap between the teeth of the test pieces any ideas?
What type of laser are you using. A .139 to .152 sounds rather large for a diode laser offset. Even my Co2 laser is closer to .07mm offset.
@@Vintauri I am using a Longer Ray 5 10 watt. I am conducting another test as I write this. When I did the first test I was using 1.0 MM plywood I think this may have skewed my results by cutting a larger Kerf being so thin. I do not recall the power setting of the 10 watt module. On this new test with 3.20 MM plywood my final calculation came out at .006096
or.0061. The laser beam size for this module is advertised as being .060 My goal is to be able to make puzzles. 😁🛫
okay, to be clar then, The Total difference in the measured and the desired width is the 'Kerf' and the offset you want to use in your drawings is 1/2 of that.
Yes.
why does my lightburn software not have an adjustment for kerf
It should show up for line operations but will not be an option for image or fill modes.
I've recently starting playing around with the kerf. You have explained things perfectly here, so thanks very much. One thing I'm still unsure on though as it wasn't covered, is that you can choose outward or inward kerf. For the shapes you were doing, outward was fine. Do you need to change it when for example, you cut a hole in to a piece of wood (inward kerf maybe?) and then have another piece of wood, stand up in that hole (outward kerf on that piece?)
Most often people need the outward kerf but if you have slots that are inside your parts, those will need an inward kerf to have a snug fit to other parts that interlock with them.
Mr Vintauri, I love this video but I can't get my head round the kerf changing due to thickness of material. I know the literal meaning is the amount of material removed but our focal point/spotsize remains the same and when we measure with our callipers, we are not measuring the edges, we are measuring the whole of the cut, thus the focussed bit is the measurement point which doesn't change, only the entry and exit sizes change and these are not measured. Can anyone shed light on this, please?
The thing you have to remember is that the laser beam is not a perfect straight line when focused. The focusing lens brings it to a point and then back out again more like an hour glass. So the thicker the material the more the top and bottom of your cut will be wider than the center. This is what causes the kerf to widen in thicker material.
@@Vintauri I get that but when measuring using callipers, we don't measure the edge, we measure across the cut so the spot size still applies, regardless of thickness ... doesn't it?
@@jimblonduk@jimblonduk You'll have a varying measurement, and if all things are perfect, the very center would be the same kerf, but as the thicker material burns, you'll find that the inefficient burn on top and bottom will cause the overall kerf from the burn to be wider on thicker material than thinner. This can also be true for more dense, thinner material. The overall effective burn on different materials will change the kerf setting. This is only critical when you need exact fitting parts. Most people will find an average kerf and just run with it.
You actually measured whole kerf, because you measured rectangle and on each side there were half of the kerf -> no dividing by 2 therefore. Whole kerf.
You do need to divide by 2 in order to get the offset since the other half of the kerf is still there in the leftover piece. Remember, you're measuring the whole kerf (as you've correctly stated) in order to get the actual offset from each side (which requires dividing by 2).
Yes, I agree on that. Prehaps I missed this detail. Thanx.
Y
Why don’t you measure the square holes as well?
I've done that as well, and it can give you an even closer full width kerf result. However this method will get your very close with a little less math.
I'm building a cross hair laser holder which has "tabs" and "holes".... So, a positive offset would apply, (.05 in my case), to the "tabs" and a negative offset apply, (-.05 in my case), to the "holes" for the "tabs" to plug into? I am sure the positive offset would apply to the "tabs" example, but, for any holes cut, a negative offset would apply? Thanks for your reply.. Hank
P.S. As 3mm Basswood is typically 2.76mm, this ALSO is an important measurement to account for....
Excellent and very informative video. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful!