Laser Bed | Forum

Hi Jacob, 

Assuming that your question is regarding CO2 laser machine. 

When you are analysing your laser bed, you have to consider those following specs: 

1-Bed Shape/Type; 

2-Bed Colour;

I can give you a brief info about these specs and why they are fundamental. 

1-Bed Shape/type - There are many options available on the market. The most common ones are Honeycomb, Knife (blade) and Nail Bed. 

The Honeycomb is widely used in most machines, It has a maximised contact area, so you can use to make smaller wood pieces or acrylic and consequently, those pieces would not end up going to your machine's bottom. The main problem with this system is that its aerodynamic keeps the hot air underneath your material. That concentrated hot air makes a mark on your piece. If you are working with a transparent material such as acrylic, that would be a problem.  Usually, users will end-up using these systems with some pivot rivets to avoid that problem. 

Knife bed is mostly used for more than 10cm pieces because of the distance from one blade to another. This kind of bed/platform is one of the best options to avoid the flashback(part of the laser beam that bounces onto your laser platform/bed and comes back to your material. This types of laser's bed seem to be a good idea to go with. However, if you intend to use for small pieces, that won't be a good idea since your laser cuts will fall down and in consequence of that, the laser beam will hit it where it is not supposed to. Probably you will have to redo the job. 

The nail bed isn't commercial. What I mean by not being commercial is that laser machine's owners found that out experimenting different designs. So far,  I haven't seen those being sold by any company. However, you can make your own using pivot rivets. This design requires lots of patience and attention to detail, yet it would not be a perfect job because those pivot rivets would not be the same length, making your bed have an irregular platform. This might be a problem considering that focal lengths are expressed in millimetres. 

2-Bed Colour;

This is an optics' fundamental question that tells you how light behaves. The darker the object that is receiving the light is, the more that object will absorb the light. In other words, having a bed that is clear and shine will not help at all with the light flashing back onto your material. 

If you want to buy honeycomb bed, look for Koeing or Trotec. However, any other shape I would recommend buying from China. Trotec also sells acrylic platform. This acrylic bed from Trotec seems to work well, although they are high cost and I can say for sure how well that will work.

I hope I have helped you. 

Cheers, 

Denis