The Problem with Cloudray Laser Heads

[Jeffrey Aley]

Put a 4mm kink in the mounting plate to lower the head with a large hammer and a cold chisel

This prompted me to back and re-examine the photo you posted. You put a very precise kink in the mounting plate - you're obviously a very good metalworker!

Just out of curiosity, where is the Y-axis rail in this photo? It seems to be missing. And looking at your X-axis bearing block - is there no cap on the grease port (the hole between the two screws in the red-plastic end of the bearing block)?

[Tim Mellor]

Both the Y axis points sit tucked below the sheetmetal visible on either side of the gantry. Cap over the port no idea if there ever was one?

Next job is make some covers for the several large holes in the sheetmatal and work on the airflow over the bed and see if it helps the engraving results.

[Tim Mellor]

Y rail shot.

[Peter Brown]

rails.PNG

[Paul Hammat]

Hi,
A fix for this particular laser head has been offered over at K40laser.se. Check it out. What they do is use a drill ( 4mm if I remember rightly) to drill out the hole of the nozzle. Then using a larger drill bit debut the hole. This gives some leeway and makes the air assist more usable. They also recommend using slightly longer adjustment screws and stronger springs on the lock screws.
Hope that helps in your situation.
I’m about to create a new larger gantry so will be installing the optics from scratch. I have the cloudray set and am about to modify the nozzle. Cheers

[Tim Mellor]

The best solution still remains lowering the head or better yet allowing some vertical movement so it can be adjusted. One of Russ's more recent videos shows a mount for the larger Cloudray system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76wW_uL-rOI

Other than that there is good and bad about opening up the nozzle. The bad is you are working the beam offset to centre of the focusing lens which is less than ideal and the resulting beam will suffer. The good is in theory there is less chance of you hitting ther bore of the nozzle making setup less critical.

With my new one I will be using the bigger set but fitted with vertical adjustment as the issue will still be present. The other way to correct it would be to reface the 45 degree bevel bringing the face lower so it can be adjusted to centre in and out but dropping the head is less work.

[Tim Mellor]

This is a bit random but expands on the rough sketch I did earlier in this thread. The Mirrors and Lens assembly are modified from Rob's Y1200 plans.

It might be of use to others trying to explain the Laser path or Mirrors. This link will get you to a page where you can view zoom and rotate the 3D image and print out if you want to plus a bunch of other things. The model should also be available to download to your PC too. https://a360.co/2KBmHIy

If I get more bored I will do some more tweakage and add the mirrors in properly and add some additional details if people think it worthwhile.

[Sven Holtzhausen]

Hey funny I just wanted to start a rant post about Cloudray or general incompetence of chinese laser head manufacturers myself.

We upgraded our Red-Black 100W with this little kit here because the other mirrors and mounts where too flimsy an just plain stupid!

https://www.amazon.de/Cloudray-CO2-Lase ... ast_sto_dp

make.PNG

Now as you can imagine after having seen....i would call them promo videos for cloudray by MW Laser and such I thought that we would get some well thought out engineering and good quality.

Well....that was not the case!

Fortunately I have Catia CAD software and was able to reproduce this abominal piece of crap engineering.

Points of interest:

1) The beam entry assuming a 9 mm beam

Head and beam.PNG

2) Where the beam should come out of the tube to the lense

beam exit.PNG

3) Where the freakin beam hits the mirror!!!!!!!!!!WHAT KIND OF A STUPID PRICK EVEN THOUGHT TO DESIGN SOMETHING THAT WAY?

mirror_only.PNG

clipping.PNG

The beam clips at a totally unnecessary 4 mm wide border around the mirror reducing the effective mirror size to only like 20 mm

4) Conclusion

We did the same as you...we ripped out the total upper half of the triangular part that is totally unnecessary anyways!

adjustment2.PNG

AND

made slotholes out of these

adjustment1.PNG

so that we could bring the beam at least a bit to the center of the OVAL!

.
.
.

Well sorry for the strong words, but after this day I feel really, really upset and somewhat scammed!

Greetings
Sven from Heilbronn,Germany

[Sven Holtzhausen]

Okay...so after the initial steam is off a bit I have a few more possibly helpful pictures for you for this specific head sold by Cloudray against them to know better!!!

1) This is what your laser beam will see when you aim for the middle of this tiny hole

This is the entry into the head

center_of_hole.PNG

This is top down looking at the mirror

topdown_center_of_hole.PNG

This is the exit it will take

beamexit_centerofhole.PNG

And this is the clipping that will occur on the "spacer" ring on your mirror mount

clipping_center_of_hole.PNG

2) This is what your laser beam will see when you aim at the middle of the mirror to get its biggest size

This is the entry into the head

center_of_mirror.PNG

This is the top down looking at the mirror again

topdown_center_of_mirror.PNG

This is the exit it will take

[Sven Holtzhausen]

and as you can only make 8 attachments here is part 2 of my previous post

This is what those idiots want your beams to enter!!!!!

Legend:
RED ideal beam for lens
GREEN ideal beam for the center of the mirror and thus the largest mirror area
BLUE what they want you to aim at (AKA the hole they just put somewhere and make you believe that this is the spot where your beam has to enter)

This is how the beams enter

idiotic_construction_all beams_enter.PNG

This is how the beams see the tube

idiotic_construction_all beams_side.PNG

This is how the beams exit the tube to the lens

idiotic_construction_all beams_exit.PNG

So I think I have made my point that this laser head assembly that you can buy is utterly crappy and a waste of money!
Hope nobody makes the same mistake ever again!

Greetings
Sven from Heilbronn, Germany