It's a freakin' LASER beam! (Laser engraver / cutter)

A new addition to my collection of unusual toys arrived yesterday.

A FREAKIN' LASER BEAM! (No sharks attached though)

Yes, it's a China built laser, but that's where they all are built so that's not really much of a choice. These units used to be $2500 just two years ago. Last year at $1800, and I just bought this one for under $600.



It's really well packed. Complaints about these imported units were that the laser tube would arrive broken, bolts/screws missing, connections loose or missing, etc. This reseller is in the US and brings in a large quantity, then goes through each one tuning it up before shipping it out. They actually make sure it WORKS before they ship it. That's huge. It also comes wrapped in about 5" of bubble wrap.

Honest, there's a machine under there:

This thing is big. I had to double check the dimensions listed to be sure it was correct. 32" wide, 19" deep, 11" tall. It has to be that wide because the laser tube in the back is that wide.



I prepared for its arrival early by picking up a simple HF service cart for $30, assembled it with the top shelf upside down to provide a smooth solid surface that I can mount the cutter to. A 5 gallon bucket with a water pump (supplied) has hoses running to and from it through fittings I put in the lid for routing the coolant to the laser tube (I just like saying laser tube. Cooooool)



I figured if it's on a cart, I'd like to keep a laptop handy to drive the unit, so I repurposed a spare single monitor arm mount (Most people have dual monitors these days, so a single arm is cheap) by mounting it to the cart, then welding up a bracket to go on the VESA mount on the arm's end. To that I attached a cutting board. I would have preferred white or red, but I could only find green and purple for the board. Oh well. I added a couple of U bolts at the front so it could hold the laptop. The ball mount of the VESA mount to the arm is retained, so it can tilt/pan in any direction. The whole arm can move readily around where I need it.

I've added on board power for an outlet strip and will be adding a permanent extension cord and storage next.

So what are the specs of this laser?

40 Watt CO2 Laser
Water Cooled
Cutting area: 8"x10" (Unmodified), 10"x12" (modified)
Software: Moshidraw 2014 (which is much better than the earlier despised versions)

What can you DO with it?

Engrave / Cut non-metallic materials including acrylic, plexiglass, wood, cloth, leather, styrene, plastics, glass, human flesh (if you're not careful!) up to approximately 1/4" thick. Thicker materials can be cut with multiple passes.

Metals *can* be engraved, but requires the use of a metal marking spray (MMS) that you coat the area to be marked then run it through the machine like normal. The laser will react with the coating to etch the metal below. The spray is NOT cheap at around $70 per 12-16 oz spray can!

What sorts of things can you make?

Engraving: Edge lit acrylic signs. Dogtags. Key fobs. Plaques. Labeling. Signage. Pretty much anything you'd normally engrave.

Cutting: Thin plywoods and acrylics work great for cutting shapes precisely and easily. Flat gears, spacers, any 2D shape you can think of. If you put in a piece of gasket material, you could cut out gaskets cleanly. You know how hard it is to cut cork without getting ragged edges? Easy with the laser. Want styrene or other material circles for gauges? Done. Want some scroll work for some decoration? Done. Reversed versions too.

I'm still getting the software set up, but the tests were successful. I'll hopefully be able to get some items cut on Saturday to test out the properties. I am pretty sure this is going to get used a lot as I come up with more uses for it. As long as you have a pure black and white image saved as a BMP file, you can cut it. That has some real possibilities.

"What sorts of things can you make?"

Don't try engraving plates to print Benjamins.

pretty badass little tool there.


I'd buy it to use it once and then it would make a kickass pizza holder. lol.

mr overdunne said:

pretty badass little tool there.


I'd buy it to use it once and then it would make a kickass pizza holder. lol.

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Thankfully I do a lot of comic art and other side projects in my hobbies, so making engraved name badges for conventions/trade shows, edgelit dealer / vendor signs, and charms will be easy things to do that will pay for the machine in short time.

It's a tool, like the wide carriage vinyl cutter that I use for vehicle graphics and other labeling. Which reminds me, I need to make up a sign for the cutter. Thinking "STORMDRAGON" might be a good one.

I would like to see pics of some of your results with the laser when you get to that point

I've got a US made Universal Laser Systems unit that I bought in late 2009. It cost as much at the time as a decent new car.

Mine's out of commission at the moment due to relocation as these things need a serious exhaust ventilation system to take care of the smoke and dust generated by the process, and I'm currently finishing the last bit of the ducting attached to the 650cfm exhaust blower.

You can see some of the stuff mine has done, here.

I have an Epilog Helix, 60 watt, 24x18 cutting area. The Epilog is made in Colorado. More examples of what these lasers can do can be seen here.

https://www.facebook.com/TwoGuysLaserEngraving

Can you tell me where you purchased it.

That is so cool.

Please share with us the reseller information, I am so buying one of those!

Good buy. We were look at one for our shop a few years ago and the $4k price was just too much.

Some tips I've discovered.

• 1/8" HDF (aka Masonite) cuts beautifully. It is cheap, cuts well, and is quite dimensionally stable as long as the humidity stays down and it doesn't get wet. I use it a lot. It is great material for making jigs for holding other items to be engraved.
• Matthias Wandel's Gear template generator program is worth buying if you plan to make stuff for the "Steam Punk" market.
• Have a look for small beveled mirrors from "Dollar Stores". They're normally sold as a candle base. LASER them from the back to remove the paint and mirror material (a bit more power will etch the glass as well), then either paint fill or back-light them. If you are good with your positioning, multi-colour designs can be done.
• Marks can be made on bare metal without a marking compound if you go slow enough and use a lot of power. My LASER tube is rated at 50 watts, and I have directly marked stainless steel with it.
• Never cut PVC/Vinyl in it. The fumes are corrosive and will make a mess of any precision metal parts inside. I have seen the work needed to rebuild a ULS LASER engraver that was used as a vinyl cutter.
• Keep your optical path spotless. A bit of dust on the lens or mirror surface will heat up and could take out the optics.

In for info!

I did a little bit of research, and this $649.00 machine on Amazon looks like it's the same machine.

A manual can be downloaded from here. It's a pretty dreadful manual that's obviously not been proof-read by a native English speaker, but it may give you some ideas.

subscribed...

I wanna see this thing in action.

I would love to have all of my electrician tools laser etched with my last name some day. Since the technology is getting cheaper, I can see this being an eventual possibility.

K-Dog said:

subscribed...

I wanna see this thing in action.

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Here's mine turning some glass into a plasma ...



The black object with the "2.0" on it is the 2 inch focal length lens assembly that travels back and forth like a printer head.

The invisible LASER beam enters the lens assembly through a port at the top left of the assembly, bounces off a few internal mirrors, passes through a number of lenses. and comes out of the bottom of this lens assembly as a tightly focused beam.

The head moves at quite a speed, so it was a case of doing a 1/12 second exposure to get the flames and then and then the flash would fire. There's some motion blurring of the head due to the 1/12 second exposure. Took about 30 shots to get this one (had lots of shots of the flames but the lens assembly was nowhere near them). Apart from cropping, there's no digital manipulation. What you see is what it looks like.

James, your vintage Craftsman logo double old fashion glasses are really cool.

ecotec said:

James, your vintage Craftsman logo double old fashion glasses are really cool.

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Still working on those (and a few other designs).

Since I last bought glassware stock, my supplier has changed the products they carry, so I'm fine tuning the etch on some slightly different glasses (same manufacturer, identical style, but 2 mm bigger in diameter and about 13mm taller).

Each different style of glass requires a different engraver configuration profile to ensure that the LASER beam is properly focused. Just a few millimeters of error in the focus, and instead of micro chips, big chunks of glass flake off.

do you have to measure yourself, or does it figure it out for you?

ecotec said:

do you have to measure yourself, or does it figure it out for you?

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Once the rotary adapter has been zeroed, so the LASER can compute a z-axis reference of the centre line of the rotary unit, the focus process is to tell the system what the glass diameter is, and the LASER offsets the focus by half that amount from the centre line.

Of course, that assumes the glass is perfectly cylindrical. If there's a taper on the glass then it gets messy. You have to wedge one end of the rotary adapter until the glass is perfectly level, and to some precision focus measurements. If the sides of the glass are curved, then it gets really interesting with compromises or multiple focus settings (glass diameter settings) in the profile. Fortunately the software can be configured with different colour "pens" in the software, each with a different focus point.

Here's a screen grab of the set up screen. Normally just black, red, and blue pens are used, and for the 72mm diameter glass (greyed out in the middle of the "Engraving Tab") the black, red, and blue pens are set for a 36mm offset from the rotary centre line. The other configurable pens are currently set to reset the LASER head to a 40mm offset, as I built this profile from an 80mm diameter glass profile.



Once you have a profile that works, you can save the profile for future use.

Here's a freshly engraved champagne flute waiting to be removed from the "Rotary Attachment" fitted into the VLS4.60. You'll see that the flute has curved sides and there's an offcut of some vinyl wood grain covered chipboard located underneath the rotary attachment to tilt the whole assembly by just the right amount. Every thing in this process was a compromise with just a single focus point set, but there was just enough tolerance in the focus for the glasses to engrave nicely over the restricted section of the glass I was working on.



I'm in the process of building a proper tilt adjuster that I can dial in a value, but for the moment, it's a case of slide something under the free end to tilt the whole rotary adapter.

I'll try not to clutter up Vegaman_Dan's topic with any more of my stuff. I created a topic a couple of weeks ago to document this sort of stuff for people that are interested.

I'm a vinyl guy, so you got my attention.