Visit the NSK UK web site

Laser Lines marks code on tiny area of oil seal

A Laser Lines (Industrial and Medical) product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 16, 2009

Laser Lines has recently marked a 10-character code on the outer ring of a customer's oil seal.

At the 10.6 micron CO2 wavelength, rubber materials mark very well, but the unusual aspect of this mark was the size of the mark area on the outer ring: it measured only 1.25mm (0.049in) high.

The marking set-up consisted of a Synrad laser, FH Flyer marking head and the Synrad Winmark Pro laser-marking software.

The FH Flyer head was equipped with an 80mm focusing lens that provides a 116-micron spot with a 0.8mm depth of field.

To create legible text marks, the rule of thumb is that character height should be a minimum of seven-to-ten times the focused spot size.

For this application, the character code was 1mm high, which is on the low-end of the range for an 80mm lens.

To create this mark, the 'Simple' stroke font was selected, a text height of 1mm was set, 0.15mm of extra character spacing was added, and a text radius of 54mm was entered to match the curvature of the seal.

On the marking tab, power was set with a duty-cycle percentage equal to 10W; a velocity of 1016 millimetres per second was added, and the mark-passes property was set to four.

By making four complete passes, the rubber surface is vaporised slowly in small increments, resulting in a cleaner, more distinct mark.

The characters are well-formed; the engraved 1mm-high text can be easily read without magnifying aids.

This small 10-character code, with four mark passes, was created in a cycle time of only 0.13 seconds per part.

Find out more about this article. Request a brochure, download technical specifications and request samples here.

Not what you're looking for? Search the site.

Back to top Back to top

Contact Laser Lines (Industrial and Medical)

Other Laser Lines (Industrial and Medical) stories

Newsletter sign up

Request your free weekly copy of the Engineeringtalk email newsletter ...

Visit the NSK UK web site

Browse by category

All suppliers A - Z

A Pro-talk Publication

A Pro-talk publication