Cutting Sailcloth

If you have recently chosen a new sail for your sailboat, yacht, or America’s Cup challenger, you know that modern sailcloth is manufactured using a variety of engineered materials and construction techniques far advanced from the simple sails of yesteryear. Today, sailcloth is generally constructed from woven polyester materials or high-performance laminates, where layers of film and polyester are glued and then bonded under extreme pressures to form composite, or laminated, sailcloth. The finished sail is coated with either a durable melamine thermoset resin to add bias stability or a urethane to reduce sail porosity.

Once it is ready to trim to finished shape, the sail material is cut out on a large-area flatbed laser cutting system. The polyester sail edge is sealed during the cutting process, which prevents fraying. To demonstrate the cut speed and resulting edge quality for several sailcloth fabrics, we set up our XY gantry system with a 63.5 mm (2.5”) optic that provides a 100-micron (0.004”) spot size with a 1.8 mm (0.07”) depth of focus. Clean, dry air (CDA) at a pressure of 1.4 bars (20 PSI) was chosen as the assist gas.

The woven sample with a melamine coating shown in the first photo measures 0.13-mm (0.005”) thick and was cut using 100 watts and 200 watts of power. Even at the 100 W power level, the cut speed of the woven polyester sailcloth exceeded 51 meters per minute (2000 inches/minute – IPM), which is the maximum speed of our table. The cut is clean with no discoloration and the edge is sealed. 

This 0.005” thick woven polyester sailcloth
material was cut at speeds in excess of 2000
inches per minute using 100 watts of power.






Using 200 watts of CO2 laser power, we cut this 0.015” thick polyester/Mylar composite sailcloth
fabric at a speed of 1500 inches per minute.

This permanent, high-contrast mark was created
in only 2.02 seconds on a zinc-plated steel surface after applying a proprietary coating and then laser marking with 20 watts of power at a speed of
5 inches per second.

Marking PET Relay Housings

This automotive laser processing application involves marking a manufacturers logo and identifying information on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) relay housings. The interaction of the 10.6-micron CO2 beam with the black PET substrate provides an easily readable, engraved mark.

To create the mark, we first imported a CAD drawing containing the Ford logo and part number data into our WinMark Pro laser marking software. We scaled the imported drawing to fit the available 21.6 mm (0.85”) square mark area and set a Power, duty cycle percentage, corresponding to 10 watts, entered a marking Velocity of 1778 millimeters per second (70 inches/second – IPS), and applied a Resolution value of 300. We added the last two lines of text using WinMark Pro’s “Simple” stroke font at a Text Height of 2 mm (0.08”) with an additional

All the data on this PET relay housing (logo and
36 character ID information) was marked using
10 watts of power in a cycle time of 0.53
seconds per part.

0.13 mm (0.005”) of Extra Character Spacing. These two text objects were marked with 10 W at a Velocity of 1270 mm/sec (50 IPS).

Our marking setup consisted of a Synrad 10 W sealed CO2 laser and FH Series marking head. The head was fitted with a 125 mm FH lens that provides a 180-micron (0.007”) focused spot over a 74 mm x 74 mm  (2.9” x 2.9”) optimum mark field. Overall cycle time to mark the Ford logo and 36 text characters shown in the photograph was 0.53 seconds.