Modern CO2 Laser Reviewed
If you’ve got a laser cutter, it is highly probable that it uses a laser diode. But more expensive machines use a carbon dioxide laser tube along with mirrors. There …read more Continue reading Modern CO2 Laser Reviewed
Category Archives: co2 laser
Illuminating Origami Is Just Around The Corner
Pop-up greeting cards are about to get a whole lot more interesting. Researchers at Seoul National University in Korea have created glowing 3D objects with a series of prototypes that …read more Continue reading Illuminating Origami Is Just Around The Corner
Water is the Secret Ingredient When Laser Cutting Ceramics to Make Circuits
[Ben Krasnow] over at Applied Science was experimenting with cutting inexpensive ceramic sheets with his cheap CO2 laser cutter when he found that (just as expected) the thermal shock of …read more Continue reading Water is the Secret Ingredient When Laser Cutting Ceramics to Make Circuits
Making Models with Lasers
Good design starts with a good idea, and being able to flesh that idea out with a model. In the electronics world, we would build a model on a breadboard before soldering everything together. In much the same way that the industrial designer [Eric Strebel] makes models of his creations …read more
Fail of the Week: Did My Laser Cutter Tube Really Burn Out?
All the cool kids are doing it these days, or more like for many years now: you can get a laser cutter for a song if you don’t mind doing your own repairs and upgrades — you know, being a hacker. The downside is that some failures can really ruin your day. This is what [Erich Styger] encountered with his cutter that is just a bit more than a year old. This Fail of the Week looks at the mysterious death of a CO2 laser tube.
This is the infamous K40 laser cutter. Our own [Adam Fabio] just took one …read more
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Scratch-Building A Supersized Laser Cutter
Now that 3D printers have more or less hit the mass market, hackers need a new “elite” tool to spend their time designing and fiddling with. Judging by the last couple of years, it looks like laser cutters will be taking over as the hacker tool du jour; as we’re starting to see more and more custom builds and modifications of entry-level commercial models. Usually these are limited to relatively small and low powered diode lasers, but as the following project shows, that’s not always the case.
This large format laser cutter designed and built by [Rob Chesney] is meticulously …read more
Video Shows Power Isn’t Everything In Laser Engraving
When it comes to power tools, generally speaking more watts is better. But as laser maestro [Martin Raynsford] shows, watts aren’t everything. He shares a brief video showing his older 100 W laser being handily outperformed by a newer 30 W machine. Shouldn’t the higher power laser be able to do the same job in less time? One might think so, but wattage isn’t everything. The 30 W laser engraves and cuts a wooden tile in just under half the time it takes the 100 W machine to do the same job, and with a nicer end result, to boot. …read more
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Arduino Revives Junkyard Laser Cutter
Some people have all the luck. [MakerMan] writes in to gloat tell us about a recent trip to the junkyard where he scored a rather serious looking laser cutter. This is no desktop-sized K40 we’re talking about here; it weighs in at just under 800 pounds (350 Kg), and took a crane to deliver the beast to his house. But his luck only took him so far, as closer inspection of the machine revealed it was missing nearly all of its internal components. Still, he had the frame, working motors, and laser optics, which is a lot more than we’ve …read more
Drop-in Controller for eBay K40 Laser Engraver Gets Results
[Paul de Groot] wrote in to let us know about a drop-in controller replacement he designed for those economical K40 laser engravers that are everywhere on eBay. With the replacement controller, greatly improved engraving results are possible along with a simplified toolchain. Trade in the proprietary software and that clunky security dongle for Inkscape and a couple of plugins! [Paul] felt that the work he accomplished was too good to keep to himself, and is considering a small production run.
Laser engravers are in many ways not particularly complex devices; a motion controller moves the head in x and y, …read more
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Laser Surgery: Expanding the Bed of a Cheap Chinese Laser Cutter
Don’t you just hate it when you spend less than $400 on a 40-watt laser cutter and it turns out to have a work area the size of a sheet of copy paper? [Kostas Filosofou] sure did, but rather than stick with that limited work envelope, he modified his cheap K40 laser cutter so it has almost five times the original space.
The K40 doesn’t make any pretenses — it’s a cheap laser cutter and engraver from China. But with new units going for $344 on eBay now, it’s almost a no-brainer. Even with its limitations, you’re still getting a …read more
Continue reading Laser Surgery: Expanding the Bed of a Cheap Chinese Laser Cutter