Laser Cutter/Engraver Thread

A few people here have the scary Chinese ones from eBay.

Yeah I have the scary chinese one, had it for months but I haven't been organised to get the local fablab help me calibrate it. Also there's the important issue of extraction which I haven't solved myself yet due to technical ignorance.

How is the lasersaur? Does eevrything you want it too?

I use an Epilog Helix 24 30 watt up at the hackerspace. A BOSS 150w is on the way, I think a 4'x2' bed, not sure. The space is in the middle of expanding and I think they deferred delivery until the laser's new home is cleaned out.

I personally use the Epilog drivers and print from Autocad > pdf > Adobe Reader > laser. Sadly, printing from autocad is not a plug and play process. Everyone else uses illustrator. I use ACAD because I'm an engineer and I already use it 9 hours a day.

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Have access to ipg lasercuters, lasered this last week

>>1065000
Have access to a 20x12 90W. I have a bunch of nice strong cardboard, what should I make

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Another Epilog Helix at the college public maker-lab. It's a bit out of my price range for a home unit, unfortunately. Been looking at alternatives.

Full Spectrum has some offerings I've been looking at. Their H-series 20x12 is large enough for my needs.

The Glowforge has my attention but they're fuck shady. (Seriously, billing six months ahead? Convenient that means no CC protections.)

Still investigating the scary Chinese ones, or DIY kits that are actually worth building.

>>1065000
>Lasersaur

Why does one of their "featured" cuttings look like it was chewed out of a piece of wood by a drunken beaver? Damn guize. This is front-page website here. You show your best.

Not impressed.

>pic related

I have access to a few at work, all different make and models, from 250w to 3000w. Made a triple monitor vesa mount last year out of 5mm steel. I use AutoCAD at home to design my parts and then import them into our CAM software at work. The largest workbed we have is 1.5m x 3m.

If I need something super precise, the 250w one has a resolution of 0.001mm.

Some other stuff I've made are keychains out of stainless steel, some misc. parts for a friends pc when he needed mounts for a watercooler (these were made out of titanium), parts for a few cars and a PSU cover for my own pc.

>>1065009
Lasersaur is alright, I have no complaints. It does the essentials like speed and power control, multiple layers/settings by using colour, lots of space, adequate power.

It doesn't, however, have a rasterized image engrave function, where the head moves back and forth and fills black areas like a Dot Matrix printer does. It natively only understands paths, but there is an addon I've seen someone use with InkScape or something that creates path lines to fill black areas so you can make do.

It connects by wifi, which is really nice for a tool that will get used by several different people over the course of a few hours on a busy day. You can have your work pre-loaded on your laptop and ready to go without fiddling with file transfer.

There is sadly no live editing in the software. If you want to make your item bigger or smaller or move its placement on the bed, you do it through your program like Illustrator or Inkscape, save the file, and reload it. Kind of a pain, but whatever.

The program does crash from time to time, we're still figuring that out.

All in all it's just as tempermental and delicate as any other laser cutter I've played with. Doesn't help that the makerspace puts it across from the woodshop, where it gets buffeted by dust.


>>1065008
I know someone with a large Chinesium one and have used it plenty myself. Not terrible, the Lasercutter software is ok, slightly less buggy than others I've used, but has some very ambiguous error notifications that don't help you identify the problem if you don't know what they are off the top of your head.
>soft stop

>>1065098
Could just be shakiness in their belts/servo motors, or incompetent power/speed settings.

>>1065000
K40 reporting in. AKA 'The scary Chinese laser cutter'. Honestly, the only 'scary' thing about it is the lack of a shutoff when the lid is opened/not closed to start the cut or engrave.

As it's a 40W CO2, I can't cut metal but I can cut just about anything else. I have done some pretty fun glass engraving as well. I made a few hundred bucks engraving 'up-cycled' wine bottle glasses for a guy locally, would've kept doing it too if he wasn't such a flake.

>>1065157
Dope. Got pics of work?

>>1065098
I work with full spectrum lasers and I can say the control software is absolutely terrible.

>>1065035
Fuckin sick

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>>1065110
fucking jelly

little cardboard sword i made a few years ago

>>1065980
It's weird how normal and boring the machines seem to be to everyone at work, almost no one sees them as a possibility to do shit for themselves, when I had just started I was rather hesitant to ask for permission to make stuff for myself but when I finally did our supervisor was really surprised that I was willing to spend my own free time at work. He even gave me free access to nearly all our materials and told me to go nuts. (Off limits materials are gold, silver, tantalum and platinum)

Later I found out that almost everyone here didn't even know how to use the machines, they'd just look up the next order on pc and then copy over a pre-made nc program, search for suitable cutting parameters on the pc and press start. Recently had a guys come ask me if I have any clue about how to program one of the machines because there was no pre-made program for the product, sort of confused I asked him if he didn't know how to program it himself and he told me he only knows how to make straight lines... The guy has been working on the same machine for over 20 years.

Is this something that is common? The people running the machines being completely clueless, easily replacable wrenchmonkeys? I'm literally the only worker who knows how to make a nc program that contains something else than straight lines.

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>>1066232
Haha fuck. Complacency eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm in more hobbyist circles than professional ones, so everyone I know pretty much loves to learn new shit.
I took a $100 CNC milling course and will likely not need to mill anything in my life. It's just good to have in my back pocket. I also took it as the base point for learning the CNC router, which I use sparingly, but have intentions to use bigger ones for scaled up production work in the future.

But yeah, that's totally dildos. Does your work offer certification/training for such things, or are they satisfied with mouseclick monkeys to handle their machines?

Your boss sounds fucking awesome. It was my understanding/assumption that workplaces don't want you doing independent projects on company machines, even if off the clock.


In pic; me and my armour. I designed and lasered the banner and spearhead, rest was hand cut.

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>>1065239
I got it pretty fine tuned and engraved a guys name on the lip of the drinking glass just to say I could. For a K40 with pretty archaic calibration and design software I was happy with it.

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This was a simple numbering job I was supposed to do for a local brewery. He had custom glass mugs made with a spot for engraving, couldn't find anyone else to do it, and I think ~$1/mug was too rich for his blood.... after spending all the money to get the mugs made with an engrave-able spot.

>>1066688
That's a Belvedere pink grapefruit bottle that was cut and sanded to a high polish.

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>>1066692
Candle holders we made for the patio at a local restaurant. There were larger ones with the full name as well.

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>>1066693
I intentionally left this picture full size, I think it is cool that you can see the surface of the glass chipping off from the engraving process. Sometimes it would look like it wasn't engraving and then about 20 seconds in to the engrave everything would spider out and crack off the surface where the laser had been, because of the micro fractures and heat stress applied by the laser. You just couldn't tell before it did that. Pretty neat stuff.

>>1066688
The radius is off

>>1066788
I know, it was mostly a proof of concept. There was multiple ways I could've fixed it but I wasn't selling them, it was just to show I could. If someone wanted an order I would've made it look as close to perfect as possible.