The FOBA M1000: Class 1 Laser Marking on a Benchtop Footprint

Marking is almost always the last thing that happens to a part. By the time a housing or a fitting reaches the marking step it has been machined, deburred, passivated, and inspected — every dollar of value already added. That is the wrong moment to scrap something because a data matrix code landed 2 mm off the datum, and the wrong moment to find that the only marking system on site is sized for a line the shop does not run.

The FOBA M1000 fills that gap: a manually loaded, Class 1 fiber laser marking workstation small enough for a bench or a cart, built on the same laser sources, software, and vision stack as the larger M2000 and M3000. It takes parts up to 450 x 250 x 200 mm and 25 kg on a 0.45 m² footprint, runs on single-phase 100–240 VAC at 400 VA, and is entirely air-cooled. No chiller, no three-phase drop, no laser-safe enclosure to build around it.

The Part Envelope Is the First Filter

Check your worst-case part — including its fixture — against these numbers before anything else.

• Work space: 450 x 250 mm. This is the usable table area, not the marking field.
• Maximum workpiece: 450 x 250 x 200 mm (W x D x H). The 200 mm height ceiling catches more people than the footprint does.
• Maximum weight: 25 kg. Fixtures count against this, so a heavy steel nest eats the budget quickly.
• Lift door: manual, 430 mm maximum doorway. An electric door is optional — worth it on a high-repetition manual cycle.
• Machine: 600 x 702 x 780 mm, rising to 1,210 mm with the door open. Check overhead clearance under shelving.
• Footprint: 0.45 m², and FOBA supports cart mounting for moving the station between cells.

One detail the spec sheet undersells: with the door open the interior is accessible from three sides, and the laser head can be manually adjusted left, right, front, and rear during operation. On a machine where the marking field is smaller than the table, that is how you reach a mark position on a larger part without building a fixture.

Class 1 Operation Without Rebuilding the Room

The laser inside is a Class 4 device per DIN EN 60825-1. The machine around it is Class 1. That distinction is the whole safety argument for a workstation marker: the enclosure and interlocks let it sit next to people who are not wearing eyewear, rather than in a controlled-access laser room.

• Laser class: 1 (DIN EN 60825-1), with safety architecture at performance level d.
• IP rating: IP43 housing, IP21 supply unit, IP54 marking unit. A clean-environment machine — not built for washdown.
• Electrical: L/N/PE, 100–240 VAC, 50/60 Hz, 400 VA with the standard fiber sources. Single phase, and the voltage window covers North American and European supplies without a transformer.
• Ambient: 5–35 °C, 10–90 % humidity, non-condensing. Air-cooled with automatic overheat protection — no chiller loop to plumb or maintain.

The one utility that needs planning is extraction. Exhaust systems are an option rather than standard equipment, and for plastics, coatings, or paint removal, fume extraction is not optional in practice.

Choosing the Laser Source and Optic

The M1000 is a housing; the result comes from the source and the optic. FOBA lists five pulsed ytterbium fiber markers, all at 1064 nm on the same CP10 head: Y.0100 (10 W), Y.0200 and Y.0201 (20 W), Y.0300 (30 W), and Y.0500 (50 W). Each includes High-Q and High-S tunings and a pilot laser, marking at up to 1,000 characters per second — 1,200 with High-S.

The optic is where the trade-off lives. Focusing optics come in f = 100, 163, 254, and 420 mm, giving marking fields from roughly 60 x 76 mm up to 315 x 368 mm depending on the application.

Note that even the largest optic gives a field smaller than the work space, and shorter optics trade field for spot size and energy density. For a small, deep, high-contrast mark on stainless, take the short optic and use manual head adjustment to reach other areas. For a large logo in one shot, field size drives the optic.

One integration detail for quote time: FOBA lists the Y.0500 supply unit at 700 VA, while the M1000 machine spec cites 400 VA for the listed fiber sources. If a 50 W source is on the table, confirm total draw and circuit sizing before the panel schedule is finalized.

Axes, Vision, and Software

A programmable Z-axis is standard, handling focus height across part thicknesses without shimming. A rotation axis is optional, and MarkUS supports up to five axes (X, Y, Z, rotary, swivel) where the hardware exists. For round parts, radial segmentation marks text and logos around cylindrical, arced, concave, and convex surfaces while holding focus.

Vision is where a low-volume machine earns back fixture cost. Both systems view the part through the marking lens, so alignment references the same optical path as the mark:

• Point & Shoot: WYSIWYG mark placement on a screen image of the part. The natural fit for single-part and low-volume work where a fixture cannot be justified.
• IMP (Intelligent Mark Positioning): automatic part detection with pre-mark and post-mark verification, passing or failing on mark position, orientation, and scale. The better answer when the same part repeats and position tolerance must hold automatically.
• MOSAIC: fixtureless marking that builds a tiled image of the field and aligns content to wherever the part landed. Requires IMP — it is not a software checkbox.

MarkUS runs on an external Windows PC and is identical across the M-Series, so jobs and operator training carry over if you add capacity later. It imports DXF (to AutoCAD 2015), HPGL, and FOBA’s MCL format, marks and reads back DataMatrix (ECC200), QR, BC128 A/B/C, and BC39, and includes a verification tool that passes or fails a mark on read content or contrast — the mechanism that turns a marking cell into a traceability step. Remote access runs over TCP/IP, Profibus, or serial.

Where the M1000 Stops

Anything over 25 kg or larger than the envelope above is an M2000 or M3000 conversation, and anything where cycle time is dominated by load and unload wants a two-station rotary machine the M1000 does not offer. What it does well: marking volume that is real but modest, small parts, scarce floor space, and a marking step that needs to move between cells rather than anchor one.

Spec It With HESCO