Optimizing the Design for Laser Cutting
How do I design for the cheapest result?
Follow the drawing rules.
By following the general guidelines described in the drawing rules, you save unnecessary costs.
Keep parts as small and simple as possible.
Large, complex parts cost more than small parts, both in material and processing costs.
Place parts close together to save a lot of material.
By nesting parts, you save enormously on material costs. In some cases, objects can be placed in the scrap material of other objects. Also keep our standard material sizes in mind to prevent unnecessary scrap.
Remove unnecessary overlapping lines.
Overlapping lines cause extra cutting time and also a less clean cut edge.
Area engraving vs. line engraving.
Depending on your design, it may be cheaper to use area engraving or line engraving. Generally, if shapes are small and complex, area engraving is cheaper; otherwise, line engraving. There are other factors to consider with area engraving; read more about it here.
Choose the thinnest and softest material possible.
Thinner and softer material is generally cheaper and can be cut faster.
Sharing cut lines.
Designs with many identical parts or many straight lines where dimensional accuracy can deviate by a fraction of a millimeter can be designed with shared cut lines. This means that these objects share a cut line on one side, but it is important that the overlapping part is removed. This technique can significantly reduce cutting costs, but sometimes outer parts are cut loose first before the inner shape is cut out. This can cause a slight shift of a few tenths of a millimeter.
Nesting.
Nesting is optimizing a drawing to have as little waste material as possible to save on material costs. First of all, it is important to look at the standard sizes of each material, which are indicated on the materials page. Place all parts within the dimensions of the smallest standard size suitable for your drawing. This minimizes waste material.
If your design allows it, you can nest parts within each other. For example, if you have different sized rings, they can be efficiently nested. This is easy for a few parts, but for many parts, it is useful to use nesting software. Most nesting programs are paid, but there are also free software packages like Deepnest.io.
It is more economical to nest yourself, but if you prefer us to do it, that is also possible. We have professional software to position large numbers of (different or identical) shapes as effectively as possible. This keeps material costs as low as possible. Not every drawing needs to be nested. In some cases, the extra work or costs do not outweigh the material savings.
Smart design of area engravings.
Area engravings are a completely different process than cutting or engraving lines, and are therefore performed and calculated differently. If your drawing contains area engravings, the laser engraving starts at the bottom of the drawing and the laser head "scans" at high speed from left to right across the material, taking a small step on the Y-axis with each back-and-forth movement.
However, the machine does not process each "piece" of area engraving in the drawing separately, but does all area engravings simultaneously (combined). The minimum position on the X-axis and the maximum position on the X-axis (per step on the Y-axis) determines the total time of the engraving; depending on how the area engravings are arranged, a large part of the area engraving can be just movement of the laser head.
This can be easily remedied by ensuring that the different area engravings in a design are positioned in such a way that no large "bridges" of movement are created. In the example below, the black text is engraved in two different ways, all next to each other and all above each other. By placing the parts above each other, the laser has to travel less distance for the engravings and the job is completed faster. The movement between the letters cannot be avoided, unfortunately.
