So I bought a laser cutter...

Something I have always pushed for is to make prototyping and small scale manufacturing easy and cheap for the developing inventor. It's from this strong belief that I've developed quite a fascination in rapid prototyping machines and cnc devices.

I finally decided to purchase a laser cutter, since I already had access to the hackerspace's 3d printer. Unfortunately it's not exactly as easy as jumping on Amazon and reading a few reviews. It took over a week of internet research to come to my decision.

What follows is the what I looked at, and what I eventually decided to buy. Hopefully this will become a multi-post tale of success and glee, and not one of woe. And of course I plan to include a full write-up on setting up, and review of the laser, once I get it.

Obviously one of the first places I looked for was on eBay. Prices are cheap, lasers are plentiful. However when you're putting down over a thousand dollars, you do some reading on the subject first. It seems the majority of the forum threads I found on the topic of these cheap Chinese lasers consisted of this:

Person 1: I'm looking at these cheap chinese lasers
Person 2: Tempting, but I'd be worried about the quality.
Person 3: I'd totally buy that!
Person 1: I think I'll buy it and report back.
~End of thread~


In fact, very little information was prevalent. There were a few horror stories or reports of poor quality, but the amount of these were on par with the reports of getting a working laser. One thing across the board was complaints of the software, however.

Apparently, there are three programs, which are just renamed versions of each other. NewlySEAL, NewlyDraw, NewlyCut, etc. Apparently NewlyDraw could cut vectors, while NewlySeal would attempt to print them as raster images, preventing a proper cut. Think of a raster image print as the same kind of print those old dot matrix printers would do - the laser is turning on and off rapidly, not staying on consistently for a deep cut. A fourth program emerged during the search - Moshidraw - but this program received equal amounts of hate.

Eventually I found Full Spectrum Engineering. While I would be spending a bit more, I felt a lot more comfortable ordering from an American company - this meant a quality guarantee, a warranty of some sort, and support. In fact, e-mailing the company resulted in a multiple e-mail chain of questions and rapid, helpful, and most importantly, clearly written and grammatically correct english responses!

Apparently they are getting a "third gen" machine, with larger print bed. I put down a hefty deposit on it and will be getting my laser shipped in a month.

I have high hopes for this laser. On top of already drooling over what I can do with the laser in the near future, there's always engraving things like cell phones and laptops. I'm hoping I can gain back much of the cost of the laser  by doing this.

Also, how cool is it to own your own dangerous high power laser? Very cool, that's how.