Molybdenum Archives - G00

Laser Marking Stainless Steel

istimat — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 20:35:41 +0000

Here I used Molybdenum Disulfide to laser mark a stainless steel battery cover for a custom motorcycle.

I detailed this process in an earlier post here:

Laser Marking Steel – the dry moly lube way

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Laser Marking Steel – Part Two

istimat — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 06:34:20 +0000

As promised, I’ve made some more tests with DM-90. Here are the knives from the end of the last post. Settled on using 40mm/s at 35% power.

It worked fine on these. I also marked my own Swiss Army Knife. The good news is, it worked. The bad news is, I chose a predominantly etched design, meaning that the laser had a lot of time to heat the blade up. This being the smaller type of knife, the blade is quite thin. Of course it warped… It does look good though.

Another thing to be mentioned is that this marking does not work on chromed or nickel plated surfaces. Tried it on a Zippo lighter and it left only the faintest mark. It may be because the plated surface isn’t porous enough.

Here’s a gif (horrible, horrible quality) of the action:

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Laser Marking Steel – the dry moly lube way

istimat — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 08:04:48 +0000

After finding out about this channel, and watching a few of his videos, I happily found out that there is a cheaper alternative to Cermark (which is about 100 euro where I am based for 300ml). The alternative is DM-90 Dry Film Molybdenum Disulphide Lubricant. And the really good news is, that it’s only about 12 euro for 500ml. So I decided to try it out.

Sadly I didn’t have a lot of flat steel worthy of engraving in the workshop, but a HDD cover worked for the first test. Here’s what I did:

Clean surface with paint thinner
Apply a coat of DM-90
Wait until it dries a bit (surface is matte)
Apply a second coat
Wait again
Laser etch
Clean with paint thinner

I tried 40, 50, 100 and 200mm/s at 35% power (about 18mA on a 40W tube). The results, in my opinion were remarkable. After cleaning it up and calming down, the next thing I did was take a screw driver and try to damage the etching. Surprisingly it barely had any effect as you can see:

We were in business now, so I started looking for the next thing to engrave. My eyes fell on my workshop buddy’s Swiss Army Knife. He decided on the Iron Cross.

Next I did my caliper. Of course, the oily caliper I forgot to clean with paint thinner… So the spray didn’t bond as well to the surface in some areas…

Next, are some awesome knives from a friend who is a knife ‘enthusiast’. You can check out his channel here. So stay tuned for those.

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