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  1. Hi all, After a good amount of cuffufles with twin rotating ballnuts for the long axis the machine is finally going!
    Although its frame is quite beastly, the gantry itself is somewhat featherweight in comparison, being made from 2 sections of old stairlift extrusion with strategic EG and steel. It's mainly for wood but of course, I had to try it on cast iron and steel (see the vid below, which shows it coming together and testing).

    Anyway, my question is, will this take a laser well? I have seen some that have a magnetic 'clip' so can be snapped on almost like a secondary tool. What are the problems I might not have considered with this? I have compressed air already piped to the spindle so that element should be easy. Fume extraction springs to mind as an uncertainty. Any suggestions on dealing with this?



    Ok thanks in advance,
    Bongo.

  2. #2
    Lasers are not my thing but I know that if it's just for laser etching then it's easy enough, but if you are wanting to cut thicker material then that is a whole different ballgame which can get expensive quickly and quite frustrating messing around setting up mirrors, etc.

    My take on mixing machine types like Plasma, Laser, is that they never work as a dedicated machine does as they have very different needs regards stiffness, speeds, etc plus fire and wood aren't a great combo.!!
    -use common sense, if you lack it, there is no software to help that.

    Email: [email protected]

    Web site: www.jazzcnc.co.uk

  3. The Following User Says Thank You to JAZZCNC For This Useful Post:


  4. Hey Jazz, Thanks for replying.
    I have the semi-ridiculous problem of not exactly knowing what I would use it for (though you can bet it will not be what it wasn't designed for). Cutting thin flat stuff would be nice.
    One application I do know I would like to try is to laser burn sections of already routed out wood. So I made a big wooden sign the other day, and thought I would v-carve the text and then hit that with the blowtorch, then skim back the flat surface to leave high contrast black (burnt) engrved text. That was the plan, but the flames of the torch would not go down into the V-shaped gullers of the text without massively charring the flat surface. So I ended up having to use a typical hand pyrography tool to go over the engraved text. It was quite a big sign and it took ages!. The whole time I was thinking surely I could use the CNC to do this. Now if I could engrave the text, then pop on a laser, a bit like changing a tool setup with appropriate offsets etc. and set it going over the engraving... I guess I might have problems with changing focal heights...?

    I agree with what you say about it really being a job for a separate machine designed for the job, but... I just used all the spare space I have with the monster in the video above... It would be great if I could also get 8 x 4 lasering capability (even if inferior to a dedicated machine) as well...

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