My lady would like a small platform laser cutter for crafts. Mainly cutting out letters from thin wood stock, like 1/16” or less. Also for making designs in the coating of metal water bottles like Yeti etc.

Budget is around $500.

Something like the Sculpfun S30 https://sculpfun.com/products/...ngraving-machine-10w

Or Creality https://www.creality.com/produ...=..search.search_1.5


Thanks!

I don't know the cost yet, but I know the people who build "personal" lasers at Rendyr. It's an amazing device.

Looks like $2k.

Bump.

I don't know if they have improved, but my wife bought a cheap China one a few years ago and was frustrating, buggy software, inconsistent results.

I bought an Ortur Laser Master 2 last year. It works fine for my purposes. Whatever you get, don't bother with LaserGRBL, just pony up buy LightBurn. It's worth it.

No experience with the Sculpfun. In your budget, it's going to be a Chinese laser. For what it's worth, I had an issue with focusing on mine, and I started a return ticket on it. Someone at the company emailed me about an hour later and gave me several things to check for diagnostics, and wanted video of it running with their instructions. Turns out, I was using the focusing measure to the wrong part of the diode housing and it was all me. It's worked fine ever since.

With your budget, you could get an Ortur S2 or S2 Pro plus the rotary tool and be engraving for probably less than your budget.

Thanks! Late to seeing the last post.

We ended up with a Creality Falcon 2 22w and LightBurn.

So far it's exactly what we were looking for. However, it is making me want a bigger faster unit. Hahaha.

Couple things that in retrospect should have been obvious:
Plan on running it from the PC, no use messing with the card.
It doesn't come with a honeycomb cutting platform so cutting is on hold until that arrives.
Also, no marked cutting mat so for positioning I've been making a field mark on paper and using that to align the project so it's positioned where I want it and repeatable.

Honeycomb bed makes a huge difference if you’re doing a UTG that isn’t with the rotary tool. I haven’t messed with it in a bit, but it’s either shift or control and click to run a preview with the laser on something like 5% power to show you the path it’s going to run, so a marked cutting bed is nice, but I’ve been able to get away with that so far.

Make sure your ventilation is good. There’s all kinds of stuff that is absolutely noxious when you burn it. Anything with plastics is super hazardous. I actually put my stuff on hold until I can get an enclosure rigged up.

quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
Make sure your ventilation is good. There’s all kinds of stuff that is absolutely noxious when you burn it. Anything with plastics is super hazardous.

True. The company I mentioned above uses a few air purifiers from Oransi in their test lab, with great success.