3 ms·

The number of hobbyist diode laser machines that come with zero enclosure or air extraction is mind boggling. It then leads people to assume that stuff is optio

• jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, it is very much negligent on the part of the manufacturers, on the other hand, at that price point you should look at these as things that you can make a laser cutter from, not a complete product. For instance, my machine was after the initial build quite far out of square, it was a parallelogram rather than a square and it took quite a bit of fiddling to get it to cut square pieces. It also didn't want to stay level and that too took some work to correct. These weren't small errors, > 2 mm in either axis across the 61 cm x 61 cm work area of the machine. But now that it has been set up properly it is quite usable. A 'real' machine has a calibration procedure that will allow you to correct for such errors as well as a large variety of others but these cheap machines just output stepper pulses in fire-and-forget mode without any feedback at all besides the ability to re-home in case they get lost (and the homing switches are so crummy that I'm amazed they work at all). But that usually implies a ruined work piece.