In this video, laser welding expert Joe Roy takes you through the basics of how to maintain your LightWELD laser welder, including preventative maintenance and how to change the cover glass.
Video Transcript
So it’s Joe here from IPG Photonics. So in this video, we’re going to be going over preventative maintenance and how to best care for your machine, so it works well for you in your fabrication environment.
Okay. So preventative maintenance is pretty straightforward and it’s beyond general housekeeping, which we’ll go over shortly. So, there’s three key things you should really pay attention to when you’re taking on the light weld system in your fab environment. First and most importantly, this is the number one issue that we find with end users who are not familiar with the system, is the protective window. They don’t even know that we have a protective window, so let’s go over it right now.
As you can see right here, I have the laser torch. Now it’s broken up into a couple of different sections which will be in another video, but let’s go over the protective window part. So here you have a dual collet design. So we’re going to undo the secondary collet, which is right here. It’s a quarter turn. Now what that does is it exposes two key optics.
One, the cover glass and two, the focusing optic. The cover glass protects the focusing optic. Now, this is called the sacrificial piece of glass. It’s going to get damaged through laser processing, but that’s the point.
It’s supposed to get corrupted so that the focusing optic doesn’t get corrupted. You’re going to have to check this at the beginning of every shift. Now, it’s very easy to swap out. All you have to do is flip this latch, that piece of glass pops out, you replace it with another piece of glass you have over here, put the latch back on, line the red dots up.
This is key. Red dot on the on the torch, two red dots on the collet assembly. They all go in line with each other and then it’s a quarter turn to the left. Now you have a newly assembled torch.
The second thing is to inspect the QBH. Well, what is the QBH? That’s the quartz block head. That’s basically where the laser light exits its environment and comes into our environment.
This is it right here going into the boot of the torch. So you’re going to want to make sure that that’s not jiggling around or loose. That’ll affect laser processing. As we can see right here, it’s locked in solid.
And third, you’re going to want to replace the trigger switches on your torch. Trigger one and trigger two. Now, I’m not going to go into this right now, it’s a more involved process for our gun maintenance, but this should be done every eighteen months. Another part of preventative maintenance is just general cleanliness.
You’re going to want to have a clean environment cause at the end of the day, you’re using light to do work and light is delivered to the work area by optics which are made of glass. So we want to make sure we have a fairly dust free environment. Now here, we have the LightWELD. Somebody left the clipboard on top of the cooling fans, which means the machine can’t cool properly.
You know, tools that have been left behind. We’re going to want to make sure this is all cleaned up. We dust off any kind of dirt or detritus that’s on the machine and now we’re ready for laser processing.
Another key piece of preventative maintenance is making sure the umbilicus is intact before laser welding. So we talked about the torch, we talked about the optics and protecting them, making sure that everything’s in proper operation, but one overlooked part of this whole machine is called the umbilicus. That’s the delivery system of the laser light from the diode package in the heart of the machine to the laser torch, but there’s also other utilities that go along in the umbilicus.
We have obviously the main fiber that delivers the laser light. We have the communication cable which sends the electrical command signals from the machine to the torch and we also have the gas delivery system hoses that are examples here. So we want to make sure there is no breaks, kinks, or abrasions in any part of this line that will affect laser processing.
Thanks for joining me and be sure to check out our other videos in the Resources section on lightweld.com.
