Comments on: Ablative power on my doorstep

By: sidharth

sidharth — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:40:58 +0000

We have retail counters of automotive glasses & car accessories in Delhi (India). We require a portable laser machine (easy to carry) for etching registration numbers of cars (stencil / designer fonds) on its side, front & back glasses.

By: Inga Baitis

Inga Baitis — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 04:18:39 +0000

Does the material to be worked have to be placed on a platform? Does the laser only move on an x/y axis or can it move three-dimensionally? Can you cut stone?? Thanks

By: Jonathan Wilson

Jonathan Wilson — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:47:06 +0000

Screw this, I want one of those machines they use on American Chopper to cut out all the custom bike parts :)

By: James

James — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:19:12 +0000

I have been looking at these machines for quite some time. If you run out of things to do with it then your just not using the old noodle. We have been running experiments with a local shop who has one and are trying to justify buying one ourselves. We have burned away the powder coat on aluminum to number connectors, etched into red lens for led readout legends, even made custom boxes by cutting .25 thick black plexi and then stacking it pyramid style. One of the only downfalls is cutting 3d depths like a cnc can do. It is possible but takes a lot of experimenting.

By: dakota

dakota — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:01:22 +0000

@chupa

Is your can of spraypaint and stencils networked? Can it run DOOM? Will it blend?

By: Alan

Alan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:32:16 +0000

Sweet looking machine! Toss up some videos when you have it doing some cool things.

By: dainichi

dainichi — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:18:56 +0000

what can your stencil and can of spraypaint do that this can’t?
;)

By: chupa

chupa — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:49:44 +0000

soo what does this do that a stencil and a can of spray paint cant?

By: Anonymous Coward?

Anonymous Coward? — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:48:45 +0000

if you just wanted to do etching you can buy just the laser module (either a co2 laser or a high power solid state IR laser would do) for woodburning and stuff like that you can use like a 1 watt IR laser (available on ebay for under 100$) and then hook it up to one of those at home cnc mill rigs and just change some settings so that it wouldnt move the laser up and down (or just change the design)

By: chris

chris — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:45:46 +0000

@macegr
Actually, there are chemicals that can be sprayed/painted on metal that allow you to oxidize the metal with a standard CO2 laser. My parrents have one for their engraving shop.

By: Will O\'Brien

Will O\'Brien — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:55:54 +0000

About $15k-20k for this model. Epilog has a new unit that’s about $8,000 now.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:37:36 +0000

so what’s a ballpark figure on how much these things run? No one lists a price, and I don’t want to waste some salesman’s time just to satisfy my curiosity.

By: chupa

chupa — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:43:19 +0000

pretty much looses its appeal/usefulness if it cant at least cut sheet metal :-/. Ide rather have a water jet or CNC router any day…

By: Kurt

Kurt — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:26:37 +0000

@Norm

Who said having to make room/sell half your living room funiture just to make room/pay for said toy was a bad thing?? If I thought that way for the past 5 years, I’d have nothing in my room, oh wait where’d this desk with hundreds of pounds of equipment come from…dammit, snapped back to reality.

By: macegr

macegr — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:34:48 +0000

seems that a lot of people have no idea how a laser cutter/engraver is used. well…we have one at techshop and i’ve used it for lots of stuff. with a 45watt laser you can cut acrylic, wood, cloth, leather, rubber, and a few other materials. you can’t cut pvc, lexan, vinyl, foamboard, etc because those generate smoky gases containing chemicals that will ruin the laser…and you. you can etch glass pretty decently. with the right power settings, you can ablate the paint off a surface without harming the underlying material…useful for laptop lids. unless you get a special laser, you can’t do anything to any metal. good uses include cutting acrylic and wood into complex slottable structures, precisely cutting paper and fabric for crafts, etching intricate rubber stamps, marking plastic, wood, or glass items. at techshop we’ve also had good luck spraying pcb material with paint and then lasering off to leave a resist pattern for wet etching. my current laser project is an acrylic pcb etching tank with integrated air bubble agitator in the bottom…channels are etched and tiny holes pierced, then the sheets are glued in a sandwich. this has been tested and works very well at generating bubbles.