After a little trial and error I was able to make a new nozzle for my NEJE A40640 laser module.  I put a bit of silicon on the end to seal it up and let it dry all morning.  In the meantime I set the focus to 22 mm for both of my laser modules and made a focusing block that can be used at the base of the laser head or on the tip of the air assist as needed.

Once everything dried up I decided to run a few quick tests.  I had a 12 mm piece of basswood that I decided to try cutting.  At 80% power and 1,000 mm/min it cut 1.1 mm, 500 mm/min cut 3 mm, 250 mm/min cut 5.8mm and 125 mm/min cut 9mm, nearly all the way through the wood in one pass.  I'm sure with a bit of tweaking I could have easily gotten all the way through.

I went ahead and tried engraving on an anodized aluminum card at 1,000 mm/min and 80% power.  That worked ok, but my motors missed a few steps so repeating the cut caused a misalignment.  I probably need to dial back on my acceleration values, I have them set high to try and get more speed out when engraving at 6,000 mm/min.

Finally I made a few quick test cuts then tried cutting out a pocket hug.  Using relatively conservative values of 4,000 mm/min, 80% power and 0.15 mm line spacing to engrave and 200 mm/min, 80% power and 1 pass to cut I was able to cut one pocket hug out in 5 minutes.  The estimator says I should be able to do a full sheet of 30 in 2.5 hours.  I can probably shave a half hour off of that if I try to optimize the settings a bit more.  In the picture above you can see my old attempt on the left with its washed out appearance and my new attempt on the right that is quite a bit darker and more defined as well.

I went ahead and put up my new air assist module on Thingiverse, however it probably needs more tweaking.  In particular I should add a small lip to it to help contain the silicon better when trying to seal things up.

Anyway it is early days, but clearly this new laser module is working much better than the old one.  I'm looking forward to really putting these head to head to see how much better it is.  I did notice an odd behavior, when powered on but not firing the laser flashes periodically.  Not enough to do any damage to the surface under it but it is strong enough to be noticeable even when wearing my glasses. I'm not sure if this is normal or not, or if it is some sort of byproduct of using too small of a power supply.  I need to sort through my power supplies and see if I have a better one somewhere.