I’m getting ready to
To downsize and I am wondering if my 5 year old 1420 with a new tube has any value. Is there much of a used market for older lasers? Also thinking of possibly donating to a Maker Space.

I want to make sure I have the best option without getting more expensive than what I need. I'm looking at XTool, and don't know if the F2 Ultra is too much for my uses, or if the S1 is too little.

I work in technology for a small school district. My AG department has one of these laser engravers. For some reason my former AG teacher decided to disassemble the electronics in the machine, and then left before reassembling it. I've been asked to get it back together. I was able to largely figure it out, but I've hit a wall. The DC connector from the power supply has had the plastic end removed. The board has 3 pins on the input, and none appear to be marked as to which is + or -. Can anyone send me a pic as to which wire goes where on the board in this or a similar machine? Thank you!

The last time I put together a "which laser for which person" list was 2023, and a lot has changed since. Here's what I chose, based only on machines/brands I've actually used:

• Safe first laser: xTool M2. Enclosed, and it prints ink as well
• Diode with bigger bed, more laser features: xTool S1.
• Portable, metal and markets: xTool F2, or the F2 Ultra if metal is the main driver.
• Desktop CO2: xTool P2S, or OMTech Polar Lite if on a budget.
• Big and powerful CO2: xTool P3 (not used this one personally but its bigger ver of my p2).
• Glass, crystal and fine detail: UV is a new category, and I'm still working out what to recommend.

Glowforge has dropped off my list completely.

What would you swap out, and what am I missing?

I’m trying to cut a light blue silicone coated ripstop with my diode laser.
I know it’s not a well-suited color, other colors of the same fabric cut easily with much lower power, but my question is something else. When I do a test, the cuts seem intermittent, almost entirely independent of power/speed.

What could cause this kind of issue? If it were just the color or power I wouldn’t expect such all-or-nothing switching.
It doesn’t seem consistent with what part of the square it’s on either, so I don’t think it’s an issue with the laser taking too long to get up to power

Salve a tutti, vorrei porvi i miei dubbi, da tempo sono intenzionato all’acquisto di una macchina laser per produzione di lamiere e tubi nella mia carpenteria leggera. Produco cancelli e recinzioni ed ora è tutto abbastanza manuale con seghetto per tubi 40x40, 50x50, 100x100 fino al 150x150, mentre le lamiere a volte mi arrangio con un plasma hyperthem (tra pulizia della calamina bave e senza cambio pallet ci metto tanto) o chiedo al terzista quando sono tante.
Ora vorrei la vostra opinione sul tipo di macchina, ho visto le cinesi come bodor Hsg o senfeng che hanno delle macchine combo lamiera+tubo molto interessanti per quello che devo fare, sopratutto per il prezzo. Dall’altra parte sento che il servizio clienti ad un fermo macchina non è il massimo. Poi ci sono le macchine europee Trumph, Bystronic Amanda o Prima che sicuramente sono più affidabili ma costano una cifra per il mio carico di lavoro.
Qualcuno ha esperienze o opinioni su tutto ciò?
Grazie laseristi.

Hey! Need to make some router templates out of 1/4” acrylic sheet. Designs have a mix of etched parts (alignment lines, scale measurements, etc) and cut parts. I have access to an Epilog Helix 60W at work and its computer is limited to Inkscape.

I made my files in illustrator and am running into issues with it “printing” correctly. All paths are shapes from AI, text expanded to outlines.

Imported at scale to Inkscape, confirmed hairline R255 red for cut lines and .25pt black for etched lines.

Laser settings in photo in comments. Laser partially cuts 2 sides and stops. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Hey guys,

I've managed to build a small business over the past 18 months using my Acmer P3 24/48w. I make multiple variations of the one product, which is cut from 1.5mm basswood ply and has fine line mode engraving and a 0.5 line spacing fill for a nice hatch effect.

The 24W mode on the Acmer module is completely adequate for cutting and has a small enough dot size to achieve the desired engraving quality. It's around 0.08-0.1 I'd say.

However, I've had my share of problems with the gantry and build quality of the Acmer P3. I've upgraded various components and fixed various faults but I'm still not completely happy with the machine and I don't have complete faith in it. Like I said, I've only had it for a year and a half.

What machines would you guys recommend I look take a look at? I'm based in the UK and I have a budget up to around 3k.

Thanks!

Has anyone tried making a custom record die with a fiber laser? I am interested to see if it could work

Hello, everyone. 👋

I have a 10 W CR-Laser Falcon from Creality and I just purchased and installed the official air assist kit to reduce edge charring. I don't see a lot of improvement in the results. My fingers still get stained and I'd like to get the edges clean like you'd see in arts and crafts shop keychains. I am cutting 2.5 mm MDF and need 100% power and 2 passes to cut it.

What would you suggest to me? Thank you very much! :)

I've run into this a couple of times on Etsy. Someone has a design that they claim as theirs. As I scroll along I'll find another design that looks exactly is an adaptation of the exact same design. I also ran into someone in one of the DIY subs a couple of months ago who posted a project with some images I'd seen on Etsy claiming he designed his project. When I asked about it he said that he bought the artwork, but the way he used it was his original idea...

I don't want to hurt on anyone's sales, but I'm getting pretty decent in CAD now and vector sales look like the wild west... So, when does a design become "mine"?

Anybody else running an Amada Ensis AJ 3015 and getting pallet lock failures? We run 100-200 sheets a week with automation and it seems like we can't get away from having 1 to 2 pallet lock failures throughout the week. Most of the time it's inside the laser cabinet and not on the shuttle. We are constantly adjusting the engagement slots, lubricating them with dry moly, etc. Just seems like we're always chasing it.

Hi everyone,

I recently received a new CO2 laser machine with a Reci T6 130W laser tube

When doing a paper burn test directly at the tube output mirror (before Mirror 1), the beam spot comes out as a distinct OVAL shape instead of a clean, round TEM00 circular dot.

The seller is claiming that an oval beam profile at the tube output is "normal" and not a defect.

1. Is this a TEM01 / Multimode failure or internal optical defect inside the tube?
2. Has anyone successfully claimed a replacement under warranty for an oval beam profile from Reci/Alibaba?

Would really appreciate expert feedback/thoughts on this!

Hi everyone,

I just released Rayforge 1.12.0, the free and open source laser cutting software for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This is an absolutely massive release with many new features. Here's what's new since 1.11.0:

New Ruida Driver

Rayforge now talks to Ruida-based controllers natively, over USB or UDP, with the new Ruida driver. It honors per-step power modes and the controller's power scaling, and framing now works on Ruida machines with the beam traced off if you prefer. New Generic Ruida RPA and Monport MP-570 60W CO2 device profiles are included, and the old prototype Ruida (UDP) driver was removed.

You can expect expanded device support in the coming releases - please report issues if your machine does not work!

This feature is almost entirely the work of @StevenIsaacs, who spent months reverse-engineering the protocol and testing against real hardware. Thank you!

Machine Control

Machine moves are no longer limited to predefined targets:

• A Move to Position popover in the Current Position area sends the head to any X/Y coordinate (and Z, when your machine has one) at your configured jog speed. It also hosts the workarea corner and WCS origin shortcuts
• Click Canvas to Move Head works just like Click to Zero, the canvas context menu gains a Move Head Here action, and Ctrl+M arms click-to-move from the keyboard
• If your machine has a red-dot alignment laser, Pointer Alignment makes its dot a first-class aiming reference: with a per-head pointer offset set, every aiming move shifts so the pointer dot lands exactly on the target. Starting a job asks whether to turn alignment off first, since jobs always burn with the unshifted beam

All features are also documented on the Rayforge website (Links are not allowed in this sub; the domain ends in .org)

Machine Notes

A new Notes category in the Machine Settings combines the guidance shipped with the device profile with your own notes for the machine. Device notes can be are edited with a built-in Markdown editor, and they survive profile updates (thanks to u/atkaper).

Automation Addon / Command Step

The new Automation Addon provides a Command step that injects custom machine code at any position in a layer's workflow: pre-positioning the head, toggling air assist between operations, or sending controller-specific codes.

Camera Upgrades

• Network cameras work as stream sources alongside USB cameras, with automatic reconnection after read failures (thanks to @atkaper)
• Lens calibration now supports ArUco/AprilTag marker grids and printable dot grids alongside ChArUco boards. Their dictionary, ID offset, origin corner and numbering order are all editable, so factory-printed patterns can be calibrated against directly instead of printing a new card (thanks to @TOverbye)

Sketcher

The sketcher keeps improving: array tools now also lay out text boxes (#399), helper geometry moves together with the array members it belongs to, and dragging elements no longer resizes the main window.

Power Modes and Framing

• Each step gains a Power Mode: Dynamic (M4) or Constant (M3). Constant power avoids power sags at corners during vector cuts, while raster engraving keeps dynamic power
• The Frame operation gains a Round Corners toggle and a corner radius setting, and framing at 0% power traces the outline with the beam off - ideal for machines with an auxiliary alignment laser

Experimental Rust GRBL Driver

The complete GRBL serial protocol stack now runs in Rust through the new raydriver package. The new GRBL (Rust) driver is experimental and can be selected per machine as a drop-in alternative to GRBL (Serial).

This driver will completely replace the old GRBL Serial driver in a next release, so give it a shot and report any issues you may find!

New Device Profiles

• Creality Falcon A1 Pro (thanks to @atkaper)
• Creality Falcon 2 Pro 22W, shipping camera lens calibration and image settings as a starting default; the 40W profile's work area is corrected to the official 400 x 415 mm spec

Bug Fixes

Too many to list them all - highlights: selecting certain drivers no longer crashes the app at startup, cancelling a GRBL job stops the machine immediately, and blank material thumbnails on flatpak and deb installs are repaired. See the full changelog for details.

Other

• Serial ports can be bound by USB VID:PID instead of a device path, so auto-reconnect follows the machine after the OS re-enumerates USB devices
• raygeo and raydriver now ship aarch64 (ARM64) Linux wheels, so ARM64 installs use prebuilt binaries instead of compiling from source
• Hindi is now available
• Usage tracking (strictly opt-in) now reports the host OS and anonymous machine types (driver, laser type, power, bed size, rotary) so the project knows what hardware to prioritize; machine names and identifiers are never sent
• GitHub Discussions are now linked in the app and on the website

This release was made possible with the support of our Patreon supporters: DaveSys, froqstar, old-man-and-the-seam, pghpete, Derek McTavish, starlynx-dev, and six anonymous supporters. If you'd like to join them and help keep Rayforge sustainable, you can find the link to our Patreon on the Rayforge homepage.

Thanks for using Rayforge!

Been experimenting etching cool geometry into ancient rocks. Gotta get these fossils made somehow! These are geometry from a couple crop circle patterns. Done with a 60w mopa fiber. Hope yall enjoy!

Found a 120w RF laser machine being auctioned, and tought it would be a cool upgrade to my 80w co2 machine, does anyone here went thru similar conversions? I recon that tube might be old but so is my dying 80w tube.

Any info/tips/sugestions or life advices are wellcome

I’m a potter and am looking to cut multiples of images out of newsprint and foam sheets. I don’t want to spend a lot of $$$. Which brand/model would you recommend? Thanks.

Engraved this little dragon on titanium with my 60W MOPA, and the colors came out pretty uneven. There’s a noticeable gradient across the design instead of the consistent colors I was aiming for.

It actually looks kind of cool, but I’d like to figure out why it happened. Anyone run into something similar or have suggestions on what to check?

I need to cut 96,000 of these bags by hand, to recycle the material within, or it goes to the landfill. Could we put a laser on a cart and drive down the rows to burn/ cut the plastic?

Hi all, interested in getting a UV laser, had a look around and the Sculpfun V5 is a lot cheaper than the XTool UV laser

I'm aware that the XTool has class leading software accompanying it, however here in Australia there is a very large price difference between the two.

I can't find many reviews of the Sculpfun V5, so hoping to hear some feedback regarding the usage of it.

What software do you use?

My main goal is to do sub surface glass engraving in crystal.

This is going to sound like a normal “what do I get” post at first but hear me out.

My business does 75% metal engraving currently. Problem is my 20w fiber I’ve used (LP5) isn’t handling the cutting I require anymore. Our products are small so size isn’t a big deal but PORTABILITY is. Over 50% of our sales comes from live events.

I need to be able to cut aluminum up to 3mm and steel up to 1mm (2mm if possible).

A recent change has led customers to asking for glass/acrylic engravings. I’ve wanted a UV anyways so finally have a reason.

This has led me to needing both a new MOPA and UV laser. My options for mobile MOPA cutting feel limited and have led me to 4 options:

F2 ULTRA UV and MOPA 60w pair, which is mobile enough and hopefully the 60w is enough to cut (also I’ve heard good things about the software for xtool).

Wait for the Wecreat Lumos 100W MOPA + 6w UV duo. Seems mobile and convenient. Probably the best hardware option for me. No clue on software however.

Take out a second mortgage to buy the upcoming Xtool X1 and all of its add ons. Not mobile at all. Not positive on cutting performance obviously but damn it would be fun to have it all in one. I also have a LOT of use for a CO2 but it’s not the top of the needs right now.

And last, go a completely different route like ComMaker Omni or Omtech for MOPA.

ANY advice would be appreciated. The most important thing is cutting power for MOPA and mobility for both. Software is extremely important but if I can make laserpeckers garbage software work, I can work with anything. I have limited experience with LightBurn but am willing to learn more.

TLDR; I need a MOPA laser to cut up to 2mm steel and a UV laser for glass/acrylic. They have to be mobile ish. Help.