My small hobby laser cutter | Blog - Martin Lellep

In this article, I am showing off my small 40W DIY-ish Chinese laser cutter. I do so primarily to give back to the open source maker community, from which I learned a lot. Thank you at this point! As hobbyist makers are constantly gauging in which technology to get in next, I provide my experiences with setting up a small hobby laser cutter based on the infamous “eBay laser cutter K40” so that you can decide if laser cutting is a topic for you. It certainly was for me!

For more information, please visit ezcad.

I was introduced to laser cutting the first time back in . There, I was able to use a 40W CO2 laser cutter at the amazing Edinburgh Hacklab during their “open night”. The Hacklab not only provided the machine to use but also great services such as support on how to operate it, best practices and the material to use. They trusted even non-members enough to let you use it without constant surveillance, which I enjoyed very much. Furthermore, kudos to the Fablab Karlsruhe that gave me the best spontaneous workshop tour I ever experienced in a makerspace back in summer . They explained me all the details of their huge and impressive DIY laser cutter.

The article will be quite comprehensive and it will mostly deal with the technical aspects of my laser cutter, both in pictures and text. Furthermore, there is one bonus tip at the end, followed by my conclusion. Since I know that people are interested in how to make money with a laser cutter, I give a few tips and write down my experiences about it in the bonus tip.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website China Resistor Laser Trimming Machine.

This blog post is not intended to be a general introduction to laser cutting. There are many aspects to laser cutting, such as how the machine itself works, how to focus it, which materials it can cut, how to create designs for it and so forth. Nevertheless, let me attempt to explain what a laser cutter is with a few sentences: A laser cutter is a machine that guides a powerful laser beam to a work piece in order to cut or engrave it. The work piece is typically a flat piece such as wood, acrylic or any other surface that is to be worked on. Sometimes also curved objects are processed. While there do exist diode-based laser cutters, the laser cutter I am talking about here uses a CO2 laser tube to generate the laser beam. This type of laser cutter is referred to as CO2 laser cutter and they come at power levels of 40W or more. The laser beam is created in a stationary laser tube and then guided onto the work piece with reflective mirrors that can deal with such high powers. Lastly, the laser beam vaporises the material and thereby creates the cuts. There are big differences between the power levels of laser cutters and I am only talking about the lower end of the spectrum. Hence, after having explained to people that I own a small DIY-ish laser cutter that can cut wood, leather and some plastics with its 40W, I typically had to negate their immediate question if I could cut some metal pieces for them. For metals, you need around 10x as much power. Larger machines might even have up to 100x as much power as my machine, meaning they offer a few kilo watts of laser output power.

After having been attached to 3D printing for around 3 years at the time of when I was introduced to laser cutting, I was used to production cycles of multiple hours to finish a single 3D printed part. I always found that this is quite a long time for the impatient hobby-ist. Suddenly, there was a method to produce parts from flat surfaces in only minutes. I was amazed and knew that I needed access to such a machine in the future as to get deeper into rapid prototyping and small batch manufacturing with it. Since in Marburg there was no such machine anywhere close, I decided to build my own laser cutter at the end of .

I based my small hobby laser off a Chinese laser cutter, commonly referred to as K40 laser cutter. Finally, my laser cutter setup is shown in Fig. 1 with my laser cutter itself and some of the additional major modifications. The modifications will be explained later in this article with texts and pictures. This part makes up most of the article. The table of contents is given at the end of this section to make it easier for you to navigate.

Are you interested in learning more about Ezcad3 software? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!