Laser cutter recommendations

[BaronVonVaderham]

Looking for a laser cutter/engraver.  What is a recommendation for as affordable laser to cut and engrave panels with? I saw some Chinese stuff on Amazon, but that stuff makes me a bit nervous. Also, I use a Mac for my drawings. Space wise I think 300x200 mm should be sufficient for my needs.

[lesthegrngo]

I use a K40 type unit, and if you buy a good laser tube (mine was from CloudRay) it will do just fine.

they can have a problem with not being completely square but I measured mine and use the ‘skew’ function in Inkscape to compensate 

I use K40 whisperer to control it

 

Les

[Biggus]

I suspect most recommendations are going to be for a K40.

A diode laser will in all likelihood not cut acrylic in any colour other than black.

[agrasyuk]

I recommend not going below the K40, maybe get a bigger unit if your budget allows. You will waste less material this way.

Also I would recommend looking into air exhaust and scrubbing. Lasers produce noxious gas when working, you will need a good way to deal with it to not endanger your health. 

[MadKreator]

On 11/18/2023 at 4:29 AM, BaronVonVaderham said:

Looking for a laser cutter/engraver.  What is a recommendation for as affordable laser to cut and engrave panels with? I saw some Chinese stuff on Amazon, but that stuff makes me a bit nervous. Also, I use a Mac for my drawings. Space wise I think 300x200 mm should be sufficient for my needs.

Hey Baron! I have a Chinese black/yellow 500x700 60 watt C02, an Omtech 30 watt fiber, and another Omtech 100watt 500x700 on the way. They are pretty large machines. The 500x700’s are 1200mm wide 870mm deep and 920mm tall. For your purposes as others have said the K-40 will probably fit the bill nicely.  You’ll be able to engrave fine, and cutting you should be good up to about 3/16” with a couple/few passes. K-40 has a good community following too for mods/upgrades. What I highly , highly recommend is getting the k-40 version ( or any other laser) that has the control board that is compatible with LightBurn software. You can design in any program you want but LightBurn is the best(imo) software to run the lasers. It is Mac compatible however not native M1,2,3chip compatible (yet?) it will run Rosetta in the background on those. My wife does all her designing on her iMac M2 with LightBurn. Exhaust/fume extraction/ air purification is a must as well. Also cooling solutions for the laser tube. From a fish tank pump in a bucket of water to a cw-3000 radiant cooler( only cools to ambient temp) to a cw-5000  (or larger) refrigerated water cooler to keep the temps wherever you want them to be. Expect some tinkering with any of them. Mirror alignment, finding true focal length, belt tension, gantry squareness etc etc, and some laser start/stop delay calibrations for various speeds.

[MadKreator]

Something along this line.

[BaronVonVaderham]

8 hours ago, MadKreator said:

Hey Baron! I have a Chinese black/yellow 500x700 60 watt C02, an Omtech 30 watt fiber, and another Omtech 100watt 500x700 on the way. They are pretty large machines. The 500x700’s are 1200mm wide 870mm deep and 920mm tall. For your purposes as others have said the K-40 will probably fit the bill nicely.  You’ll be able to engrave fine, and cutting you should be good up to about 3/16” with a couple/few passes. K-40 has a good community following too for mods/upgrades. What I highly , highly recommend is getting the k-40 version ( or any other laser) that has the control board that is compatible with LightBurn software. You can design in any program you want but LightBurn is the best(imo) software to run the lasers. It is Mac compatible however not native M1,2,3chip compatible (yet?) it will run Rosetta in the background on those. My wife does all her designing on her iMac M2 with LightBurn. Exhaust/fume extraction/ air purification is a must as well. Also cooling solutions for the laser tube. From a fish tank pump in a bucket of water to a cw-3000 radiant cooler( only cools to ambient temp) to a cw-5000  (or larger) refrigerated water cooler to keep the temps wherever you want them to be. Expect some tinkering with any of them. Mirror alignment, finding true focal length, belt tension, gantry squareness etc etc, and some laser start/stop delay calibrations for various speeds.

That’s some useful stuff! I’ll keep it in mind. I’ll need to make sure size wise is going to fit indoors. I have an extractor for airbrushing models. Need to double check the specs (it’s quite wide, well over 2ft), but do you recon it would do the job?

[MadKreator]

1 hour ago, BaronVonVaderham said:

That’s some useful stuff! I’ll keep it in mind. I’ll need to make sure size wise is going to fit indoors. I have an extractor for airbrushing models. Need to double check the specs (it’s quite wide, well over 2ft), but do you recon it would do the job?

I think it would do just fine power wise. As long as the working area suits your needs. One other thing to consider, that I’m not sure about on the k-40’s is the depth from the laser head to the bed. I don’t know how much adjustment is there. I don’t think the work bed is adjustable, I think focal length is determined by adjusting the laser head itself. I buy the big deep machines, not necessarily for the working area but for depth, so I can fit the chuck/lathe style rotary axis in there to engrave tumblers and cups and things like that. But we use ours for our actual 2nd business, which is laser engraving lol So I kind of need the wide array of being able to do anything that comes along. It looks like it has a built in exhaust fan ( probably a simple PC fan) so you would just need to route some tubing out of your space , or over to your airbrush fume extractor. It comes with a simple water pump but I do recommend at least a radiant style cooler like the cw-3000. Lasers do work best in a certain temperature range, usually 18-22 degrees Celsius is the optimum range. If your going to house it in a non-climate controlled area, like in the garage, you need to use some form of antifreeze mixed with your distilled water to keep the water in the glass tube from freezing and destroying it. The climate where I live will fluctuate from the low single/teens in the winter and 105 degrees F + in the summer. If you're going to be  working in hot temperatures the the actual industrial chiller is highly recommended  (cw-5000+) although those will cost almost as much as a k-40 itself. You may find that a bucket of water to be fine, and use frozen water bottles like big ice cubes in there to keep the temps in check

looks like k-40’s are about 20” deep, 32” wide and 9ish inches tall. 

It’s 100% worth looking at different styles and researching as much info as you can. Whether it’s an omtech, monoport, or other brand, I think all k-40’s are pretty much the same.  The control board in them is the key piece you want to look at closely. It will dictate what software you can use with it.  And it doesn’t need to be a k40 necessarily. You’ll find that many machines are the same machines just re-branded( unless you get into high end ones like epilogue, thunder laser, trotech etc). Those are built with better components but they get extremely expensive. More industrial/ high throughput kind of needs. 

I have a buddy with a k-40… at least I’m pretty sure that’s what it is… I know it’s a smaller desktop style.  I will ask him his thoughts on it and some of the ins and outs.

Edited November 20, 2023 by MadKreator

[No1sonuk]

On 11/20/2023 at 5:04 AM, agrasyuk said:

I recommend not going below the K40, maybe get a bigger unit if your budget allows. You will waste less material this way.

Also I would recommend looking into air exhaust and scrubbing. Lasers produce noxious gas when working, you will need a good way to deal with it to not endanger your health. 

null

[Spitty]

With the K40 many remove the bed and add an adjustable table to be able to get the focal length right.