Lasercutter

I bought one of those famous "Cheap China Laser Cutter", having a 40W CO2 Laser via Ebay, shipped directly from Germany. The whole parcel arrived after two days, well protected and in good conditions. The first impression: by far better than described in various comments and blogs :-)

Especially this page is an ongoing document and reflects some of my notes while using the cutter.

Modifications

- Safety Switch: once you're opening the cover, nothing is interrupting the Laser beam which is quiet dangerous. Hence a simple switch installed in series with the "LaserOn" does make what expected

- Light

- Air Support

- smoke fan modifciation

- the water basin for cooling is a mikro-world where alga love to grow. I bought from a DIY-store some chemicals to prevent this, the same substance which is used in swimming pools.

Projects

• Engraving
• Papercuts
• Woodwork
  • Boxes

• • the SVG file can be found on the download section of this site
• Lego compatible supports
• Engraving the name into a soft cover
• Models (see further details in the 'Figures' section)
  • USS Enterprise found the laser cut plans for 3mm plywood on Thingivers

• mobil stand and passive speaker. The speaker system really amplifies sound/music coming from the built in speaker, no electronics needed.
  • The construction consists of couple of glued layers, the power supply can be plugged in and magnets keeping the two stacks in place

• picture engraving: glass plate combined with a white LED strip

• gears: some kind of gear mechnics to lock a compartment (see the woodworking sub-site)

useful tools (all web based)

• Box builder: Extremly useful is this online tool where you can easily design various boxes MakerCase Easy Laser Cut Case Design and change the vector file afterwards
• Various boxes - from shelf to encoder housing. Boxes.py
• Gear builder: Woodgears
• Geargenerator:this one can export directly into SVG format GearGenerator, good example here. Update: SVG download is not free anymore
• another one with DXF Export InvoluteSpurGearBuilder allow regular, rack and pinion or planetary gear design
• nice online tool is Gear Designer from Jerome Leary
• design boxes, puzzle, gears, etc with help of the Spatz
• Bitmap zu vector conver Autotracer with astonishing results!
• Community page K40LaserCutter

Note: To be more accurate, consider the removed (burned) material in your tolerance considerations

Cutting parameters

Here I will list continuously different setup from speed, power and cut repetition on various materials. Have marked the current regulation from 0%...100%; that's the numbers you'll find below

Cutting

Engraving in Cutting mode

Issues

• hard to set up reliable position so can be tricky to engrave exactly where you want to.
  • As workaround I set a marker (small cross) in the upper left corner, which I duplicate in all layers and so automatically be used as reference