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Cutting 1mm Aluminum Issues
Matt
Published on Sep 6,2025
1
17

I have been cutting Stainless steel and carbon steel mostly without issue.  Now I am working on cutting some 1mm 5052 aluminum and I have found that the default settings just do not work.  

 

I have the 1200w machine with compressed air at 90PSI using the normal cutting head.  I tried with the settings in Xtool Studio:  

100% power, 220 mm/s, 100% duty Cycle, 3000 Hz.  

I end up with two issues.

  1. Does not cut through, and even with a hammer does not come free
  2. After about 4 2"x2" squares, the machine overheats

I did a lot of testing of different settings, what I ended on was:

75% power, 30 mm/s, 50% duty cycle, 3000 Hz

Now the pieces fall out and I have not hit the same overheating issues.  I get a little slag on the bottom of the cut, and have tried tweaking the focus distance between -1 and -2 with no change.  

 

These settings seem soo different from what is suggested from XTool that I just do not know if there is something wrong with my machine, I am doing something wrong, or something else.  Has anyone else done any aluminum cutting?  (I was having similar issues with some 3mm aluminum, but I have not gone back to trying to tweak that).  

 

I will say, when cutting some 1mm mild steel, most of the intricate details were cutting fine, but anytime that I had long cuts (like sides), it would end up not cutting through with the default xtool settings.  I ended up going down to about half the speed.  I think that in the details, it does not have time to get up to the faster speed, so it might have similar issues that the settings in xTool Studio are a little too fast, or I am just missing something.  

 

Thanks for any help or suggestions.  

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