Engineering specifications
Material matrix, source selection, symbol grading and the measured speed model.
Manufacturing and fabrication
Every part leaves the nest already marked
Your parts come out of the nest carrying the serial your ERP issued, so nothing gets picked up, carried and put down a second time to be marked.
- Nobody types a serial into a laser at two in the morning.
- No marking station to find floor space for, and no queue behind it.
- An unmarked part is a part that was never cut.
Where the job number goes
The part is anonymous from the second it drops out of the nest.
- The job traveller is a sheet of paper on a bench, or in somebody's back pocket.
- Parts get grouped by bin and by memory, and a split batch is reunited on trust.
- A part fails in service, and the question is which heat, which revision, which weld procedure.
- A warranty claim covers the whole batch, because nobody can prove which parts were affected.
A station, or inside the cut
Marking inside the cut takes out four costs, and a fifth nobody quotes.
| What it costs | A station downstream | Inside the cut |
|---|---|---|
| Floor space | A station in a shop that has none spare | None. The head sits on the machine you already run. |
| Labour | An operator, or your cutting operator taken off something else | None. It runs inside a machine cycle you already pay for. |
| Queue | Parts arrive in nest batches and get marked one at a time | No queue. The part drops out of the sheet marked. |
| Fixturing | Every part picked up, located, marked and put back down | The sheet is the fixture, and you already own it. |
| Discipline | A separate step gets skipped when the shop is behind | There is no step to skip. Compliance is a property of the machine. |
The cut pauses, the code lands
Light Lane marks with a machine it did not sell, inside a job it did not write.
- Step 1
The job is released
The Control Layer pulls the job, part, revision and heat number your system already issued, read only, through the pattern your IT team sanctions.
- Step 2
The cut starts, unchanged
Sheet loading, assist gas, focus, lead ins and pierce sequence are untouched, so a proven cutting process carries over.
- Step 3
Motion pauses before the last cut
The part is still held in the sheet, located and clamped to the accuracy of the machine that cut it.
- Step 4
Marked in position, own serial
Every part in the nest carries a different serial, because the identifiers arrived from the ERP as a list.
- Step 5
The cut resumes
The final contour is cut and the part separates carrying its identity. One machine, one pass, one setup.
Mark type and depth
Depth is a setting, not an accident. All three read through coolant, deburr, blasting, primer, paint and powder coat.
| Mark type | What happens in the metal | Depth |
|---|---|---|
| Annealed | The surface oxide changes, and the passive chromium oxide layer stays intact. | No material removed |
| Etched | Material removed on a single pass, for a fast high contrast code. | A few microns |
| Engraved | Material removed over multiple passes, at a cost in cycle time. | Up to a few tenths of a millimetre |
The engineering detail
For the engineer, quality, and supplier approval.
Cycle time, and what moves it
In-nest marking happens inside a machine cycle that was already running. A small Data Matrix plus a line of text on steel is a few seconds per part. Dense text, large logos and engraved depth move that into tens of seconds, because beam time is path length, not area. The number is measured on your own parts.
Fatigue and stressed parts
Annealed marking changes the surface oxide to give a dark, high contrast code with effectively no material removed, so you get readability without a notch. Where a drawing caps depth or reserves a zone, the mark is specified to that depth and placed where the drawing allows. Structural sign off sits with your engineer, who holds a marked coupon first.
Round, curved and as-cast parts
Round stock and shafts run on a rotary axis. Curved and stepped surfaces are held in focus by three axis dynamic focus, with distance sensing correcting continuously. Vision corrects X, Y and rotational offset before the mark is placed. As-cast surfaces scatter the beam, so the code is sized up or moved to a machined pad.
Standards a customer audit quotes
Data Matrix is generated to ISO/IEC 16022 and graded to ISO/IEC 15415, with ISO/IEC 15416 for linear symbols. Where a prime contractor flows down MIL-STD-130 or AS9132, the content, syntax and permitted surface effect come from their requirement, and the mark is verified against it.
Which cutters carry a head
The controller, the inputs and outputs, the head clearance and the work envelope decide it. It is assessed at survey and confirmed in writing before it goes in a proposal. Where a retrofit would sit against your machine warranty, the specification is a standalone cell on the same core.
Your job system stays the source
The Control Layer reads NetSuite, Infor M3, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Cin7, Unleashed, Fishbowl and the job system somebody wrote in the nineties. Read access covers the fields the mark is composed from, and write access is one field. Records queue through an outage and replay carrying the original mark timestamp.
The rest of the shop's marking
Once a head is on the floor, the same core picks up work done today with a marker pen, a dot peen unit or an outsourced order. Serials on turned parts, and plate and bar marked at goods in with the heat number. Structural sections marked in place with a counterbalanced arm, jigs, gauges and grade stamps.
For the rest of the committee
Forwarded to people who were not on the call.
Start here
Integration architecture
Connection patterns, failure behaviour and network posture, for IT.
Modules and rigs
Jigs, rotaries, extraction, enclosures, counterbalanced arms and handheld rigs.
Programme assurance
The document set, the acceptance gates and the handover pack.
Send us a part
Post a part in the material and surface condition it arrives in. Name what happens to it afterwards: the coolant, the deburr, the blast, the powder coat, the years in service. You get back the parameter set, the grade, and the seconds it adds.
Last updated August 21, 2026