One of the best ways of cleaning accumulated slag is to use a powerful laser slat cleaner. Then how to choose one right slat cleaner for you laser cutting machines? Before come to the topic, let's look back to our current traditional ways first. One traditional way to remove laser slag is to clean the laser slats with simple tools, such as one cheap air chisel, even hammer. sometimes it works. While 1) Too hardworking and super low efficiency. It takes days for one person to finish one laser bed. 2) Nearly at all time, it ONLY works for CO2 laser cutting machine. While come to more tough Fiber laser cutter, there's nothing to do. Another traditional way is to replace laser slats until your slats look like slag mountains. In this way, 1) Reduce laser cutting process reliability and the quality of produced parts because you don't clean the slats in time. 2) High cost for multiple replacement one year, including slats raw material, laser cutting, disassembly and reassembly etc. 3) Too many employee involved. Generally speaking, to avoid shorten the waiting time, over 3 or 4 persons work together. 4) Have to stop production while replacing laser slats. Most important thing is terrible cleaning result in the both above ways.
So, how to avoid the above problems can lead us to choosing our right slag removal tool. Please attention to the below points.
- Outstanding cleaning result. For operators, just by trial using one tool, it's easy for them to see it.
- For use on both CO2 and Fiber laser cutting machine. As you know, it's a recent trend that more and more people choose fiber laser cutting machines due to high accuracy and productivity. Slag on fiber laser cutters is much more tough than on CO2 laser.
- For use from low power laser cutters to high power up to 10 Kw fiber laser.
- Slat cleaning can be performed on unused bed during laser machine operation.
- For use on most manufacturers laser machines, such as Trumpf, Amada, Bystronic, Mazak, Mitsubishi, LVD and SALVAGNINI etc.
- Suited for the most diverse materials: stainless steel, mild steel and aluminium.
- Adapts automatically to different slag thicknesses.
- Can be operated by one person. Easy to operate.
- Low cost to maintain the tool.
In the current laser slat cleaner market, only few manufacturers are working in this field. For big companies, it's too small business for them. While for some small companies, they want to do it best while short of abilities to design and research. And some companies developed their slat cleaning tools many years ago for CO2 laser cutting machines. When fiber type becomes popular, they didn't upgrade their tools in time to adapt to the trend. Of course, to clean high power fiber laser slag, they need redesign and change some structures and use more powerful motors accordingly.