Air assist is not only for flame prevention etc, it does a lot of things, it cools the cut, blows away melt thru the kerf (cut line), clears debris and smoke etc round the work area and so forth. Too much and you get bad edges, heated zones, warpage etc and too little you get rough edges. The PPI is how many times the laser "drills"thru the substrate in an inch and is hugely influential in the cut. Most ppl don't even bother with air assist settings, but these are vital for great edge finishes We did similar with cutting, tho there PPI plays a big part as does air assist. Obviously one wants to do the best work so quality is important. Essentially you want to always try keep your speed to the max the material/laser/optics can handle cos in lasers time = money, so when testing always keep that in mind. Eventually you get what all laser engravers want, optimised quality at the fastest speed. We then started right from our original and varied power to tune that and looked at many things like the smoothness of the engraving, its edges, depth, heat affected areas etc (a 10x loupe is invaluable for the laser engraver, it tells you just whats going on.) Once we got a combined figure which optimised the quality vs speed, we then varied dpi and ppi a bit just to see what happened. What we did in terms of engraving is do tests starting out at what we thought was a good figure and then increasing speed by 10% (or decreasing) and then fine tuned a speed figure. Ie not better at 12% speed and 50%power (if extrpolating to a faster machine you must slow down the speed) but something like 20% speed and 80% power (just using those figs as an example). It was actually a good thing as we tried different ppi, dpi, power and speeds and found that lets say engraving at 25% speed and 50% power was actually better at some other arb setting of both parameters. we were using a slightly higher powered and different make of source with different beam quality and characteristics. We tried existing settings and extrapolating but it didnt work well, so reprofiled most of our settings from scratch.
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