Laser Engraving Brass

Over the years we've been asked to mark a wide variety of materials, but one of the more common materials that we mark is brass. Used in a wide range of industries, settings, and applications brass is a commonly marked material. 

Permanently Marking Brass 

Brass can be one of the more difficult metals to mark because of its high reflectivity to 1064nm laser light. More power is better than less power when marking brass and a 30 or 50 watt Langolier is a good solution.

Often, brass components must be legibly, clearly, and permanently marked for a wide range of reasons; sometimes for identification and traceability like the Broadley-James Corporation needed when they purchased their laser engraving system.

In that particular example, a manufacturer of sensors purchased a laser engraving system to permanently and legibly create ID and traceability marks directly on their products. In addition to brass, the system they chose also marked stainless steel and plastic, giving them a wide degree of flexibility with one machine. 

Creating Dark Look Marks 

Brass is also often marked with things like logos, like in this example of a deep laser engraved logo and text using a Jimani Langolier Class IV.open table fiber laser. In this example, we used a 54mm lens (7.2 X 7.2” field) with the 20-watt fiber laser with “dark mark” laser parameters. No additional processing was required to achieve the dark contrast mark. 

When engraving on brass there are a number of different looks that can be achieved. In this example we created a dark look engraving with a 50-watt laser.

Deep Engraving and Surface Etching Brass

Another common way to mark brass is with deep laser engraving. In our first example, the mark was made with a 50 watt deep engraving fiber laser and a 254mm FL lens. The total mark time was about 1.5 seconds.

Deep engravings show up well on brass, but so does a surface etching like in this example. 

This brass nameplate was laser marked using a graphic file of the negative of the text.  We used a 20 watt fiber laser marking system to create the crisp text on the bronze background. The laser marking process took 5 1/2 minutes and the brass plaque measures 9 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches.

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Contact Jimani to see how we can help you meet your goals with a state of the art laser marking system.