What problems do people tend to run into when marking metal?

The biggest problem we see is that people don’t have their settings correct. You need to optimize your settings a little bit. We always tell everyone, run your laser at full power (100% power). This process is always high power, slow speed. There are some laser manufacturers that don’t recommend running its lasers at 100% power, so I tell those users to run as close to full power as the manufacturer recommends. 

When figuring out settings, the easiest thing to do, depending on people’s different skill level and their comfort, is to utilize the color mapping functionality (most lasers have this functionality). Color mapping allows you to set up a graphic and assign different colors to different parts of the graphic. When you go in and run your laser, you can set everything that’s red to run at a certain power and speed and everything that’s blue to run at this power and this speed, etc. It allows you to test a bunch of different settings in one run. A lot of people aren’t aware of it or don’t use it, but the nice thing about it is anytime you come across a new material, you have this way to optimize the perfect settings within five minutes. It’s easy once you have it set up. So that’s what we always recommend in determining the metal marking settings. 

   —Enduramark