El Beast - Initial design phase, comments and critique welcomed!

[Desertboy]

Well we shall see how it works out, I'm not expecting to be able to retire any time soon but I'm hoping she can make enough money to pay off the expense of the machine/maintenance and generate a little income from something she enjoys doing. Obviously this stuff is becoming more and more accessible so there are a lot of options out there for people looking for bespoke laser created items but I do feel its the sort of low volume thing that fits a "cottage industry" type operation rather well. I think going around and getting some tie-ins with local wedding dress shops and flower shops etc would be a good way of generating some business in a crowded online market.

But more importantly, I get to play with a frikkin laser!

what size cutting area has it got?

[Zeeflyboy]

20"x11.5" I believe, although in theory as long as the material isn't too thick (the slots are quite narrow) you can use the passthrough slots to feed a longer piece of material 20" wide through the machine though I haven't tried obviously.

I believe the plan eventually is for it to take care of the passthrough automagically using the cameras for alignment and continuation of the pattern but that isn't available yet in the beta software. I believe it can be achieved manually you just need some way of indexing and aligning.