New Toy - Laser Engraver

[poolhound]

Thanks to Bill (Buena Park) who posted about his laser engraving of some pens last month, I ordered one of its bigger brothers. When I got back from my trip to the UK it was sitting waiting for me and I have had a 'fun' weekend getting to know its quirks and foibles. There is still much experimentation to do but I have the basics figured out and I think this will be a fun addition to my woodworking.


This is the product I bought although the same unit is available in a number of places so if anybody else is interested its worth a quick check around to see who has the best price or free shipping. http://www.gearbest.com/3d-printers-...pp_290386.html. I paid $160 which was 2x what the one Bill showed but this has an etchable area of approx 6"x8" and does not have the height restriction and can etch into much larger workpieces. The one thing I did not try yet was etching into the top of a bottle stopper which was one of my ideas. based on the experiments so far this should not be a problem.

Here are a few pics of what it got it to do so far.





One of my dogs - Harley

[JR]

That is very cool! The mind boggles at the possibilities.

[Bill in Buena Park]

Excellent Jon! Glad to see you have it together and operating. I'm going to keep my eye on this one should I decide to engrave something larger than pens in the future - thanks for sharing!

[LCHIEN]

Yeah, I'm interested. How does it compare with the units sold by Banggood.com. Did you look at them at all?
Is this the same unit?
http://www.banggood.com/2_5W-Desktop...p-1001413.html

If they're all the same hardware, is the software all the same, too?

[BadeMillsap]

OOOOOO .... Ahhhhhhh... You guys are really making me think about this ... fun stuff for sure!

[tfischer]

Holy cow these are getting to be affordable. I think I know what's going on my Christmas list lol

[poolhound]

Loring, I am still not quite sure of the relationship (if any) between Banggood and Gearbest and the products they sell. As far as I can tell they are independent companies but sell many of the same things, Basically they are both Chinese distributors of a wide range of consumer and electronics goods from sources who knows where. Remember this is not like buying from Rockler or powermatic so "Caveat Emptor" applies here in spades!

They link you showed does seem to be essentially the same product although with the rail connectors being different. the 3 key components are the stepper motors, the laser and the control board. The ones I have looked at all use various models of Eleks Maker control board. The different sizes are simply just rail kits as the SW/HW doesnt care about size it seems to be just the physical limitation of the rails/cables etc. There is free software called benbox that you can download from both gearbest and banggood. and there is a forum called benboxlaser.us that discusses it, the laser machines and other related topics. you can see a thread here that mentions some of the products and deals available as of a week ago.

http://benboxlaser.us/index.php?topic=470.0

If you look on that forum you will see much discussion of the T2 Laser SW which was written by a member there. It does seem better/easier and for the ~$30 I bought it yesterday.

These devices are certainly not your $2000+ CNC routers, some of the tech is down and dirty, they are made who knows where and I wouldn't count on much/any customer support.However for a couple of hundred bucks it seemed like a fun project and hopefully it will let me make/sell some personalized woodworking down the line.

Yeah, I'm interested. How does it compare with the units sold by Banggood.com. Did you look at them at all?
Is this the same unit?
http://www.banggood.com/2_5W-Desktop...p-1001413.html

If they're all the same hardware, is the software all the same, too?

[LCHIEN]

Thanks Jon, then the next question is, is 2.5 W good enough? How long did it take to do some of those items you posted. They have lasers in a wide range of power and it seems to me that the cost is very much a function of laser power first and frame size second. The frame size is clear in advantages but I'm sure the time is proportional to laser power, and probably 2.5 W cuts probably more than twice as fast as 1 W but how much time is required is not clear. Are we talking about 1 minute or 10 minutes or 100 minutes for the ones you did?

I presume in the software you have to specify a linear writing speed (which is adjusted in SW for making non-right-angle moves) and that's how you pick the darkness/contrast level of your work and also sets the total time according to the total length of your laser writing required.

As a toy you could wait any length of time but as a possible money item time is important.

[jussi]

Very cool Jon. Looking forward to seeing more projects and review after you've had some time with it. What other types of material will it work on? Does it work better with certain materials?

[poolhound]

Thanks Jon, then the next question is, is 2.5 W good enough? How long did it take to do some of those items you posted. They have lasers in a wide range of power and it seems to me that the cost is very much a function of laser power first and frame size second. The frame size is clear in advantages but I'm sure the time is proportional to laser power, and probably 2.5 W cuts probably more than twice as fast as 1 W but how much time is required is not clear. Are we talking about 1 minute or 10 minutes or 100 minutes for the ones you did?

I presume in the software you have to specify a linear writing speed (which is adjusted in SW for making non-right-angle moves) and that's how you pick the darkness/contrast level of your work and also sets the total time according to the total length of your laser writing required.

As a toy you could wait any length of time but as a possible money item time is important.

Excellent question and one I am not sure I am yet able to answer with sufficient clarity. When I originally saw Bills post on the little unit and then looked at the longer discussions on penturners.org I had exactly the same question i.e. what is the benefit of the various laser powers. the small unit had options of 1W and less and the one I purchased has options ranging from 300mw to 5.5W. Larger units have much stronger lasers in the 30W,50W,100W range and are a completely different proposition and cost waaaay more. The answers I gleaned on what power laser I needed were that it depends on whether you wish to engrave or cut. If you want to cut things out or make holes through items then you need lots of power. There seem to be folks using these low power lasers to cut out card or up to 1/8 ply but it will take multiple passes e.g. 8. My application is for some simple personalization of pens and other small ish items. The design of the little unit constrained both size and height which is why I chose this open gantry design. I did go back and forth on whether to go for the 5.5W version but as the idea originated from the posting of bills $80 unit which was affordable for an experiment the 5.5W unit at approaching $400 was more serious cash. the 2.5W version at only $160 seemed worth a punt to at least get my feet wet with the whole process.

To try and get back to your question about speed I still have some learning and experiemnation to do but I beleive you are essentially correct in so much as the speed of movement more than the laser power determines darkness/depth. The T2laser SW does let you control the laser power somewhat but I think you may just need to leave it on max and adjust the time parameter. I think speed also depends on the image and whether it is vector or raster with vector being much faster.

With that said I did not time anything on my first tests but IIRC the basic outline text items were pretty quick probably less than 2 mins. The other items which were images took longer but I dont think anything took more than 20-30 minutes. when I get a chance to do some more tests I will be timing things and comparing various settings.

This may not have helped much but there so seem to be many different variables including the SW, Image, material and even type of wood.

[poolhound]

Very cool Jon. Looking forward to seeing more projects and review after you've had some time with it. What other types of material will it work on? Does it work better with certain materials?

Basically it can be used on wood, plastic, bamboo, rubber, leather, cardboard, paper. Nothing shiny so not glass or metals.

[leehljp]

Did you see the Bruce Robbins' laser adapted to cnc that also rotates the pen body? My body became antiquated a couple of years ago, but upon seeing Bruces work, my mind suddenly saw my pen visions fade into oblivion!

[poolhound]

Did you see the Bruce Robbins' laser adapted to cnc that also rotates the pen body? My body became antiquated a couple of years ago, but upon seeing Bruces work, my mind suddenly saw my pen visions fade into oblivion!

I did see that and it was very cool but yet another whole level of technology up from these basic lasers. My goal was simply to be able to engrave and personalize certain wood projects. I seem to have jumped into yet another world of CNC and GRBL geeks. As a lifelong techie its not too bad but I dont really want to have to learn the intricacies of grbl so I hope I dont go tumbling too far down this particular rabbit hole.