Hi Everyone!

[Nick Playle]

Hi Everyone,

My name is Nick and I'm an electrical / aerospace engineer, working primarily in hardware design.

I've got a CNC router, 3D printer and a bunch of woodworking equipment. In the past I've run CNC mills and plasma cutters, and done retrofits on ATHC systems and stepper to servo conversions.

I've been passively designing a laser system for a few months now, based on the extruded aluminum further laser design. I just pulled the trigger on the mirrors and rest of the electronics. Right now I'm looking at which laser tube and power supply I should go with, so any suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks,
Nick

[Gene Uselman]

Welcome Nick- we have a couple people building that design [I actually have the plans... just because ] and it can be hard to figure out what you may end up doing with the machine ultimately, but that is probably the biggest factor. Many people say that the smaller tubes do more precise engraving but I have been happy with my EFR brand 130w, still running after 4.5 years and will cut a lot of stuff that the smaller tubes will not. I suspect that the mechanics have a lot to do with precision. I posted a pict for a private message question about two tube machines so I will attach that one. The next question is how much quality are you willing to pay for- Reci is considered the best but there are a lot of tube available of course. Good luck. Gene

Here are the picts- taken with a very old Sony camera I am afraid- the spirals are what I show to customers to give an idea of the kerf of the cut- they can be pushed out like springs- the white one is .125 acrylic and the round one is .5 thick acrylic, the flowers are Corian [countertop] and done in 3D from a relief bitmap which is normally used with CNC routers [forget the actual term right now] and while it works it is pretty slow, better with a fiber laser I suspect. The lower pict is a coaster engraved from an M.C. Escher design and the Aztec calendar is engraved on the back of an acrylic mirror with the back then covered with black for contrast. The coaster is oak surface MDF plywood and the other wood is solid .125 Walnut that we use for wooden earrings among other things.

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1300x900-130w engraving.jpg

[Nick Playle]

Awesome, thanks for the info! I also bought the Y400 plans, there's a lot of useful info in there and they were an excellent value.

I was initially going to go with a cloudray 50W tube but am now looking at others, potentially EFR. Everything I've seen shows Reci as being a really good tube but they don't have anything that has a lower power. Initially I was looking for a lower powered tube just to play around with, then see if my needs for something higher power came up. I don't really have any realistic use cases so far actually of what I want to do, so justifying the higher cost of a higher power system is hard right now, though I usually like to just buy things once, so there is a strong argument for just going with a higher power system from the get go. I think metal marking and glass etching might be what I primarily use it for.

I have a 3W (actual) 445nm laser I played around with for engraving on my router with picengravepro, but since it's ball screw it just doesn't have the speed to do anything in a reasonable amount of time. Also there was some trickery in getting linuxcnc to control laser power as a 5th axis... My intention for engraving is mostly to try and mount the 445nm laser as a second head, but we'll see if I ever get around to that.

Below are some of the engravings I've done with my 445nm laser, kindly ignore the shoddiness of everything, it was done way back about 4 years ago now when I was living in an apartment and didn't really have a work space

[Pete Cyr]

You did nice job on those