New toy….. I mean tool…..

I’m still trying to figure out which it is. Maybe it’s both… a grown-up toy that’s a cool tool. I have to admit I was pretty excited when the delivery guy pulled up out front and rolled up the door on the trailer. I took the day off just to make sure I was there. We got it off the truck and stashed it in the garage and that is when I realized…

That this is a lot bigger than I thought it would be. Yeah, 4 feet long and over 2 feet on the other dimensions. Crap…..I don’t have any room for something this big. Hmm, maybe it’s all packing space and foam to insure the trip from China is a good one.

Nope, it’s all machine. One big, fat , awe inspiring 50 watt cnc laser cutter/engraver. So, I guess there is only one thing I can do…. re-arrange the garage and make room to squeeze it in. It fit in it’s new spot but barely. No pictures of it’s area until I make a decent stand for it, right now it’s on cinder blocks and portions of the packing crate. There is some redneck in the blood somewhere, at least it’s not my house on blocks.  😉

Of course it couldn’t be smooth sailing and laser light shows. Being a chinese product from mainland China I gave it a serious and thorough once over to make sure everything looked like it was in generally the right place. As soon as I plugged it in to the socket something cooked and the breaker to the garage popped. Not good. Turned out the culprit was the primary power supply for the electronics, not any of the expensive laser stuff yet.

Mmmm…. Toasty. Well, it gave me a good chance to see if the 3 year warranty was worth it. The people I had to talk with were in Hong Taiwan or something like that, so all correspondence was answered at 3 in the  morning. They are paying for the replacement part and some time to do the work. Check is in the mail they say. We will see if it shows up. In the mean time, I needed to get this thing working, so a new power supply went in , got wired up, and turned on. All checked out, the laser powered up and smoked holes through some popsicle sticks I had laying around so it was time to try something. The very first attempt to cut a file turned out like this….

I’d say that was a success. Mom’s favorite embroidery file and a little text engraved, a square cut out to finish. The one thats right side up in the pic is actually in the hole it was cut from. The laser cuts a very very fine line.

One was cut from 1/16″ ply and the other from 1/8″ ply. The engraving in the 1/16th” ply went almost all the way through, leaving a thin layer about the thickness of a half sheet of paper. It looks kinda cool if you backlight it.

Each of those took under a minute to cut. It’s a lot quicker than using my cnc mills to do this kind of work. This last pic is a piece I just cut, a little over 10″ from top to bottom. Took about 2 minutes to cut and I’m really liking this machine.