When choosing a new sail for your sailboat, yacht, or America’s Cup challenger, you’ll find that modern sailcloth is manufactured using a variety of engineered materials and construction techniques far advanced from the simple cotton sails of yesteryear. Today, sailcloth is often constructed from woven polyester materials or from high-performance laminates, where layers of film and polyester are glued and then bonded under extreme pressures to form composite, or laminated, sailcloth. The last step in finishing the sailcloth is to apply a coating; either a durable melamine thermoset resin to add bias stability or a urethane to reduce sail porosity.

To demonstrate the cutting speed and the resulting edge quality for a selection of sailcloth fabrics (ranging in thickness from 0.005” to 0.022”), we setup our XY gantry system with a 2.5” focusing lens that achieves a 100-micron (0.004”) spot size with a 0.07” depth of focus. CDA (Clean dry air) at a pressure of 20 PSI was chosen as the assist gas.

Kiss-cutting, cutting objects from an adhesive-backed sheet without damaging the backing material, is a common CO₂ laser application. This is because Synrad’s line of CO₂ lasers allows precise control over laser output power. By adjusting the pulse width (PWM duty cycle) of a fixed modulation frequency, typically 5 kHz, the instantaneous power output of the laser is varied to deliver the exact amount of power required to perform an operation. In this case, we cut a 0.002” thick adhesive-backed paper outline from its 0.001” thick backing material.