Collaborate Disseminate
You have to really like slide rules to build your own, including the necessary artwork. Apparently [Dylan Thinnes] is a big fan, based on this project he began working on …read more Continue reading Design and Build Your Own Circular Slide Rule
One of the limitations of the conventional Cartesian CNC platforms is that the working area will usually be smaller than its footprint. SCARA arms are one of the options to …read more Continue reading Small Footprint Scara Laser Engraver has Massive Build Area
Getting great results from a laser cutter takes a bit of effort to make sure all of the settings are just right. But even then, if the air between the …read more Continue reading Hacking an Air Assist for the Ortur Laser
Last month in my hands-on review of the Ortur Laser I hinted that I had done a few things to make it work a little better. I made three significant …read more Continue reading Hacking the Ortur Laser with Spoil Board, Z-Height, and Air Assist
I couldn’t write very much without a computer. Early in my career, I wrote with a typewriter. Unless you are pretty close to perfect — I’m not — it is very frustrating to make edits on typewritten stuff. The equivalent …read more
[Brain] wanted to mark some scissors with his Ortur laser engraver. The problem? The laser won’t cut into the hard metal of the scissors. His solution? Smear the scissors with mustard. No kidding. We’ve heard of this before, and apparently, you can use vinegar, as well, but since the mustard …read more
Right now, you can get a diode laser engraver on eBay for around $100 USD. That sounds like a deal, but it’ll probably use some arcane proprietary software, won’t be terribly accurate, and the laser itself will almost certainly be fully exposed. Of course there’s no shortage of DIY builds …read more
Continue reading An Open Hardware Laser Engraver For Everyone
Sometimes you just gotta sit down and hack something together. Forget the CAD and the cool software toys; just hammer away until you have something working. That’s how [bobricus] ended up with this cute little laser engraver anyway.
For under $300 US of parts and a few nights working in …read more
The average FDM 3D printer is not so different from your garden variety laser cutter. They’re often both Cartesian-coordinate based machines, but with different numbers of axes and mounting different tools. As [Gosse Adema] shows, turning a 3D printer into a laser cutter can actually be a remarkably easy job. …read more
Laser engraving and cutting has something in common with focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass: good focus is critical to results. If materials of varying thicknesses are used, focus needs to be re-set every time the material changes, and manual focusing quickly becomes a chore. [Scorch Works] has a clever solution to avoid constant re-focusing that doesn’t involve sensors or motors of any sort. The result is a self-adjusting bed that compensates for material height changes, ensuring that the top surface of the material is always a fixed distance from the laser’s head.
The way [Scorch Works] has …read more
Continue reading Spring-Loaded Bed for K40 Laser Acts As an Auto-Focus