AndyUK's Build - 1.2x1.0m Gantry

[AndyUK]

Yeah, just a bit of a experiment really. £130 for a 10W 450nm Laser Tree 80 24V from their AliExpress store.

Made the first couple of cuts tonight - was a bit of a bitch to setup and I'm not particularly enjoying how dangerous it feels for my eyes (I have reputable laser Goggles etc, but I used to work with similar lasers in an optics lab so know how evil these things can be), and it's quite fumey too. That and the fire risk.

Having said that though, very happy with the results so far. Here was my first ever time running Gcode on the laser (UCCNC seems relatively capable, although clearly not designed with lasers in mind - there is a recent lightburn import plugin which is really helpful). Flipped the axis for the next cut and it looks fantastic - although in my first material test squares I ended up blasting through the 3mm ply and then on all the way through 20mm of MDF.... Whoops.

The below test text is about 50mm wide, took about a minute with a single pass at 3000mm/min 50% power.

Hopefully some point I'll do a summary post with a few complete projects, and more on the 4th Axis testing I've also been up to.





Anyhow, Happy New Year all!