Anybody have any experience (good or bad) with laser engravers?
Currently we have an engraver (looks like an XY plotter with a spinning engraving tool where the pen would be), but would like move into the current century.
I’m not looking to tie it into E10, just to be able to manually enter a serial and model number, and have it engraved our our current serial plate. And not looking for any fancy bells or whistles.
In my past life, the company I worked at had a Trumpf laser engraver. Worked well, pretty fast, and error messages were a mix of English and German! 
That was about 15 years ago…
Figure out what type of materials you’ll be marking, and that will define which technology (and $) you’ll need to do the marking. We had to anneal mark bare stainless, so it needed a pretty powerful laser.
Think about how you’ll feed them, or nest/pattern the parts if doing in batches. I assume most will have a Z-axis that lets the machine have full 3D to mark on curved surfaces, or 2.5D where it’ll step up and down to keep focus. Nameplates should be easy.
I assume software has come a long way, but we had to feed it with either vector files. It did raster, but very slowly. That might impact productivity.
If you are just making tags, we had a demo from these people. Everything seems pretty impressive while still being simple, we just haven’t ordered yet because of revenue at the moment.
This winter we purchased an Epilog Laser Engraving & Cutting Machine, so we could start producing our own metal product labels in-house. Instead of being dependent on an outside vendor, who’s leadtimes were getting longer and longer.
It’s working well so far, currently setting up templates in Bartender and linking them to excel documents, to pull the data from. At some point, we’ll be using Epicor to generate the needed data automatically.
Hi Calvin,
We don’t have a laser marker but have an old dot peen that is well supported by Schmidt marking. They appear to have laser marking machines too. Goran Budaji from there was very helpful in getting us support to use our Epicor data for autopopulation of nameplate info and he works near us in Bucks County.
Nancy
Thanks @Nancy_Hoyt
(P.S. I just looked up your company, and I live in Richboro, about 5 miles from you guys!)