I keep thinking I’ll produce some grand treatise on something or other, but never find the time to sit down and write. Partly because I’m a perfectionist and putting something out for all to see that isn’t up to a high standard is difficult for me. Partly because I’m a jack of all trades (and thus master of none) so don’t feel like I’m capable of providing anything good. Throw in having three teens in various activities, projects galore, and a fair amount of laziness and well…

Anyway, I saw the recent call for articles and realized I had a topic I could put together pretty quickly and not be worried about my lack of expertise or perfectionism since it is something brand new to me and I hadn’t seen anyone discussing this topic previously. I’ve been thinking a lot about a side hustle for quite a while and I finally pulled the trigger on something I think I can make a go of – laser engraving/cutting. I just received this laser a few days ago and have been playing with it ever since. It’s about the cheapest one you can get, but it is decent quality and has a couple options that are pretty important to me, namely limit switches on the tracks and three laser types that cover a good range of potential work types. This last is important as we’ll see in a minute.

The Basics

Like many things, laser engraving and cutting is a large subject. We’ll just touch on the basics. There are four types of lasers used: UV, diode, CO2, and fiber. Diode lasers are the cheapest and that is the one I bought for learning, see the picture below for some details. Diode lasers are good for working with organics like wood, leather, paper, etc. They will also work on acrylic (is that organic?) and with the right techniques you can mark (not engrave or cut) some metals, glass, and stone. The main advantage of diode lasers is the low power and small pixel size, so they are best for recreating raster images, including photos. The main disadvantage is they are slow. CO2 lasers are also good for organics, but have more power and are much faster than diodes. They are also much more expensive, generally starting in the mid four figure range for anything decent. I don’t know much about UV, but they also start in that range and get quite expensive from there. Fiber lasers start pushing five figures and are the only ones that will cut or engrave metals. We have one like this at work for engraving stainless steel parts for our products. It cost $25k and is made in the US. Many lasers are made in China, which is where mine came from (Hong Kong, actually).

 

 

Apart from laser types, there are various form factors as well. Mine is the simplest T or L type with two tracks meeting at one point. Larger ones have a gantry style with a square frame with a single movable track that rides on top. Some are open form, while others are enclosed in a box like the one we have at work. This is just scratching the surface, but you get the idea. Let’s get to the fun part!

Using the laser

One of the reasons I got this laser was the simplicity of setup. It was fully assembled except for the laser, which was simply a matter of plugging in the wires and attaching it to the dovetail on the track. Easy peasy! Next I had to decide on controlling software. There are two main programs for running lasers: LaserGRBL (free, opensource, Windows only) and Lightburn (paid software for Windows, MacOS, and Linux). I downloaded both, but used LaserGRBL for this demo. I’m not sure if I will buy Lightburn yet, but probably will at some point. They charge $60 for a year of updates for the version I need for my laser. You can keep it forever, but need to pay every year to keep getting updates.

One of the neat things about the laser I got is it’s small and portable. It literally just sits on a flat surface to operate. It has the option to attach to a substrate with included brackets, so I bolted mine to a 18″x18″ piece of AC sanded plywood. I also burned in a grid pattern with metric measurements for easy alignment of the workpiece. For the laser to work properly, it needs to be focused. My laser came with the gauges to focus it to 50mm from the workpiece. Once you connect the laser to the computer and the software you need to place the gauge under the laser but on top of the workpiece as shown in the picture below.

 

 

Now we need to decide what to burn, both the design and the substrate. I’ve been practicing with thin cardboard we had from random boxes, though I did burn an image of my late mother in law onto the back of a pine wood plaque we had (at my wife’s request) for testing purposes. She wants to make a bunch for her seven siblings this Christmas – without the hanger in her forehead!

 

 

 

For our purposes I’ll stick with the cardboard and use an image from the Glibs merch to burn. You can use raster or vector files, each having differing use cases. I grabbed a jpeg from the website and saved it to my computer, then opened it in LaserGRBL. Typically, you’d edit the image in your favorite imaging software to get it just right, but in this case the image was just fine for our purposes. Once I changed a few settings and made sure the workpiece was properly aligned, I was ready to burn.

 

 

 

 

As I said, diode lasers are really slow, but for something so simple and only burning into cardboard, this went really fast, taking about a minute and a half. For reference, the photo of my mother in law took an hour and forty minutes. The final result is nothing special in this case, but I think you can see some of the potential for this technology, especially for the side hustle I’m working on. Currently, I’m thinking mostly wood engraving with raster photos for now, since that is where this little laser shines, but I hope to get another laser for this machine so I can do some cutting and deeper engraving. And since this machine is portable, you can just place it on larger workpieces to engrave small images, for example on a business sign or a door. I have a lot to learn before I start making any money, but it’s fun and I like the tinkering so it’s a labor of love so far and I hope it stays that way.