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rawringcrafts · 4 years ago

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Where have you been I missed you! Also, what kind/brand of laser cutter engraver did you get and do you like it? I’ve been seriously contemplating getting one but all the reviews seem very....paid for....and I just wanna make hella nerd shit in my own home.

Aaw <3 As I said in that post earlier, I just don’t have the spoons to follow more than one social media site at a time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have a “k40″ laser cutter made by Nurxiovo. Although that means very little. All these 40 Watt laser cutters on amazon and ebay are basically all copies of each other. There is very little functional difference.

The one thing you need to ask yourself when going in is: Am I able and WILLING to mod and improve this machine? Because right out of the box, they are neither good, nor safe. To give you an idea of what -I- did to my machine, I’ll write out a “changelog” at the end of this post. If you want a machine that you buy, take out of the box and it just works, get a glowforge. You’ll pay 4-5 times as much, but that’s the price of foolproofing.

If you are going with a K40 cutter, the only two things I would look out for is to get one with an actual ampere meter, not just a “laser power” indicator and that it has a board that is compatible with K40 whisperer. https://www.scorchworks.com/K40whisperer/k40whisperer.html

K40 Whisperer is a MUCH improved open source driver for these machines. Don’t even bother with the default program that comes with them.

Also what you have to consider is that the $400-500 you pay for the machine is not the only thing you need. Expect to spend around another $150-200 on improvements.

Ok so the changes/improvements I made to my machine in no particular order:

-Made my own hose adapter that is ACTUALLY air tight -Threw out the hose that came with it, in favor for a fire proof aluminium dryer hose -Threw out the fan that came with it and replaced it with a 440 CFM in-line fan -Threw out the coolant pump for a much more reliable and stronger one, that’s actually god damn grounded -Installed a flow switch interlock, that will automatically shut down the laser tube if the coolant stops flowing. This is to prevent the laser tube from exploding if the coolant pump ever fails. -Installed a lid-opening interlock. This is ESSENTIAL. Out of the box, these machines have no sort of safety features at all. This interlock will shut down the laser tube if the lid is not fully closed, preventing you from accidentally burning or blinding yourself. -Cobbled together an air assist from a CPU fan -Added handles for easier opening -Threw out the cutting clamp thingy that came with it and replaced it with an aluminium sheet with holes -Added a simple closet moisture trap to the electronics compartment, because I live in a literal swamp -Installed a remote kitchen thermometer to the coolant to monitor it’s temperature. -Bought a cheapo Win8 tablet to run K40-Whisperer off of, essentially giving the cutter an integrated touchscreen. -ACTUALLY GROUNDED THE MACHINE! This is the biggest WTF I had to deal with with my particular machine. The grounding wire was attached to a painted section of the chassis and further separated from it with plastic washers... So effectively the 20,000V machine was not grounded. Your mileage on this may vary, but this is 100% the first thing I’d check for before even powering up the machine.

Not all of these mods are strictly necessary and there’s hundreds more you can do to improve the cutter further, this is just what I did (although I highly recommend installing the interlocks and checking for proper grounding)

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shinesurge · 4 years ago

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A quick announcement regarding the shop!

We made a business decision and bought a Glowforge in 2019, which was pretty spooky but has been INCREDIBLY helpful with the variety and sheer amount of Things I've been able to make for comic merchandise.

Unfortunately, Glowforge has done the predictable thing and now charges people for using the machines they already purchased. I bought mine before this idea was even suggested so I was SUPPOSED to be grandfathered into, like, retaining basic functionality for this item I paid 3,000 dollars for, but apparently they're not very organized over there since my entire design library cleaned itself out a couple weeks ago because of the new "designs that aren't opened in more than 30 days are deleted" rule.

All the items I designed for conventions and the online shop over the last two years are gone! I do save the actual art files myself of course, but Glowforge doesn't allow users to keep any of the data like cut settings or piece sizes outside their online program, so I'm basically going to have to start completely over doing all the testing and polishing I do to make Everything.

I know the audience for these messages is incredibly small (people who spend money on my comic or people who could afford to even consider buying a goddamn home laser cutter) BUT I felt like I should say something about this anyway.

First: Everything that involves the cutter that I don't already have some stock for has been taken out of the shop for now, but they'll be back! At Some Point. If you wanted one of the little Lucky Noons or the traveler tokens you'll still be able to get one as soon as I'm able to do the work involved in redoing fucking everything lmao

Second: Glowforge isn't unique here. I and many many other small business owners who handmake all our merch use Cricut machines to do damn near everything and they pulled the same shit recently. I know I'm an old man yelling at a cloud about how I don't trust any kind of service that doesn't let you hold the product in your hand, or in this case keep it on your own computer rather than logging into an online system, but this is exactly why. They WILL fuck you over if it makes them more money. There isn't a whole lot we can do in cases like this since the whole reason indie creators invest in these kinds of things is BECAUSE we can't afford to go through mass production options, this is the only way we can do it ourselves alongside all the other jobs we do. I don't make enough profit to afford to regularly stock fifty sticker designs with a minimum order quantity of 200, but I CAN drop a chunk of money on the means of production One Time and be able to make any stickers whenever I need them, you feel me

We're such a tiny outlier group that, understandably but frustratingly, nobody is really talking about these niche issues or advocating for us. When I looked around the Glowforge community the response to the completely disastrous premium model was mostly positive because the only people buying these machines are rich dads who can afford to drop thousands of dollars on a hobby; I went around in circles with tech support for two weeks and they still don't understand what my issue is with suddenly being unable to stock two years' worth of items.

But there aren't a lot of other channels to go through ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's still pretty new to have fabrication options at home that are accessible to people who aren't already familiar with specialized equipment, there isn't any legitimate competition out there and that's why the two or three options we DO have are able to pull shit like this. Out of that already small user group, people like me who are using the equipment for producing our own things for business purposes are an even smaller subset. But I would just like to suggest, if anybody out there is working on fabricating their own Stuff for conventions or comics or whatever, please be very very aware that the companies making our equipment are not our friends, expect anything you NEED an app or something to use to disappear at a moment's notice, and make sure to keep as much data (art assets, dimensions, any tiny weird setting you can think of) in offline personal files you manage yourself. Whenever you can, make sure you can find the raw materials outside of the company itself so when it stops being profitable for them to make it available you can still make things.

in conclusion I Am Tired thanks for reading all this and for your support i will have the anime trinkets back up as soon as i can

#u can make fun of me for buying a glowforge its okay i know #i KNOW #this was like getting on a leaky boat that i KNEW was going to sink but there arent any other boats god dammit #i knew the jaguar would eat my face but i am tabling at momocon and the jaguar is holding my inventory hostage sO SHRUUUGS

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this-lioness · 5 years ago

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So Saturday we’re going to a masquerade ball. The theme is something like, “Red Carpet Through the Ages” (?), so basically you’re supposed to style yourself after the era of your choice. We picked the 80s (duh).

I found a cute dress at Salvation Army a few months ago (I hope I can still squeeze my fat ass into it), and I’ve got a pair of fishnet tights to go with it. I also found a pair of red suede ankle boots, and I’m going to hot glue some black lace trim around the inside cuff. I think I’ve still got the red lace wristlet gloves from my Scarlet Witch cosplay, too, but I’m going to need to raid the attic for those.

I’ve been looking everywhere for a hair crimper, but no luck. :( Unfortunately using braids doesn’t really work on my hair, but I might see what I can do with a small-gauge curling iron I’ve got lying around. Failing that I’ll just tease and hairspray the fuck out of it.

Anyway, the last big piece will be the mask, which I need to work on tomorrow. Joanne Fabric had a nice paper mask in a pretty dynamic shape, so I took a snapshot, traced it out in Photoshop, and started working on some New Wave designs for it. I’ll hopefully get that painted tomorrow.

I wanted to make my own acrylic jewelry with the Glowforge but, ha ha... no. There is no more time. I’ll hit the two local thrift shops tomorrow and see if they’ve got anything chunky that could work, even if I have to paint it.

#oc #adventure #art

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years ago

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Make a RetroPie tabletop arcade game player with the help of a Glowforge laser cutter

Mark Frauenfelder:

[This post is sponsored by Glowforge. To get $100 off a Glowforge Basic, $250 off a Glowforge Plus, or $500 off a Glowforge Pro use the link glowforge.com/boingboing.]

My 15-year-old daughter and I love retro video games. We often go a retro video game arcade in Pasadena, California, and we also play a lot of computer games from the 1980s and 1990s. We thought it would be fun to build a dedicated machine at home that we could use to play these retro games.

After a bit of online searching, we found out it’s easy to use a Raspberry Pi, which is a $35 single board computer the size of a credit card, along with a free Linux based operating system called RetroPie that has emulators for every arcade and console imaginable. We could use a Raspberry Pi and RetroPie to play every arcade game we want. And with our Glowforge laser cutter, we could easily make an arcade cabinet for ourselves as well quickly make them for friends and family.

In this 2-part video series, which was underwritten by our friends at Glowforge, I’m going to show you how we did it.

Parts and Materials

First, we bought all the parts and materials we needed to make the cabinet. We got a Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+, a 32GB MicroSD card, a power supply, a 10-inch HDMI monitor, a set of arcade buttons and a joystick, a pair of speakers, some cables and a box of various machine screws and nuts and standoffs.

Tools One of the most important tools we needed was a pair of digital calipers. You can buy these measuring tools online for cheap online. We used these to measure the dimensions of the different parts, such as the button diameter and mounting hole dimensions. The coolest tool we used was the Glowforge, which we used to cut the wooden sides and see-through acrylic top of the cabinet.

The cabinet was one of the first things we made on the Glowforge, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to set up the Glowforge. Just 30 minutes after pulling it out of the box, I was cutting out shapes and making engravings. With a Glowforge, the possibilities are endless - it cuts plastic, wood, acrylic, and even leather, and can be used to engrave almost anything. I’ve included links to a couple of other videos we made that showcase everything the Glowforge can make.

Design For inspiration, we went to Pinterest and took a look at a bunch of different DIY game cabinets. We ended up going with a minimalistic design because I like the look of mid-century designer Dieter Rams.

To design the cabinet, we used a free web application called TinkerCad. This is a very easy-to-use computer-aided design app that kids and adults can use to design parts for 3D printers and laser cutters.

The next step was to laser cut the design we made. We used our Glowforge, which is incredibly easy to use, because it has a built-in camera that scans the material you’re cutting, making it simple to place an image of the shapes you want to cut using Glowforge’s web-based application.

In the next video, you’ll see how I cut out the cabinet and assembled the components.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/23/make-a-retropie-tabletop-arcad.html

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ichiblack · 5 years ago

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P-95 just makes the best boxes.. Even better that this is basically a blackboard! #loopinemetalworks #glowforge #whatmadethis #lasercut #tapplastics #acrylicplastic #maker https://www.instagram.com/p/ByedIhkhsyP/?igshid=utg6q2411bpy

#loopinemetalworks #glowforge #whatmadethis #lasercut #tapplastics #acrylicplastic #maker

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1stchoicebhl · 2 years ago

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Get creative with your holiday gifts!

www.1stChoiceBHL.com

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onlyfroaskingcmcqusetions1 · 3 years ago

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I just saw something I want it's called glowforge and it's basically a laser printer cutter thing it looks perfect.

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this-lioness · 5 years ago

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Keeping busy

My goal is to get 10k words written by the end of September, but at this rate that is going to be a struggle.

I’ll talk more about writing stuff in another post, though, because that’s really sort of a separate entity. For once it’s less about lack of desire and more about lack of actual time. Shit’s been crazy for like two weeks straight now.

Rosie had her vet appointment last Wednesday, and did well. She still has pretty persistent diarrhea, so in addition to the second round of Panacur (which starts Tuesday) they’re trying her out on a pro-biotic, and something else for colitis / intestinal issues. We’re on day two of both, still no improvement, but we’ll keep at it. They thought she looked better, brighter and healthier overall, though, and she gained almost a pound!

The cabinet doors have all arrived (I’m pretty sure, we need to take a complete inventory, but it looks like everything), which means that we can start working on the cabinets at any time. I picked up a palm sander last weekend, which will help enormously in the sanding / priming / painting cycle.

Part of the kitchen “back splash” is covered in this stuff called Z-brick, which was popular in the 1970s. It’s essentially a faux thin-brick panel, except it isn’t in sheets like actual panel. Rather, you have to basically chisel the shit off the wall, and it’s going to take a lot of the underlying sheetrock with it.

To that end we’ve decided to just whitewash the z-brick where it sits, since it’s really not all that awful to look at. The balance of the back splash is just exposed wall, so today I was talking to Marc about doing a custom tile back splash.

I’d like to either buy some hand-painted Italian tiles, or buy fired bisque tiles that we can paint, fire and glaze ourselves at one of the local paint-your-own ceramics places. It would be really nice, especially, to do one of those six-piece mosaics with a kind of custom illustration... maybe cats and berry plants.

We’ve also been hitting the cat room / office / geek room conversion pretty hard. I think I already mentioned that we moved the treadmill into the cat room, and last weekend we emptied a bunch of crap from the studio and Marc framed and built a floating shelf along the whole width of the back wall:

There’s now room enough for the laptop, external monitor, tablet, printer, AND an area to paint, plus plenty of storage underneath. He really did a bang-up job, I spent most of Wednesday working and it was super comfortable and cozy.

In the days since he assembled two new bookshelves, and brought down two more from the attic, filling them with the trades that he’s decided to keep from his initial collection.

We ALSO found a used sleeper loveseat at a yard sale on Saturday for just $25! It was a bit of a struggle to get it upstairs, but now it’s in place in front of the studio / geek room TV, and I’m looking forward to long winter afternoons camped out there with a laptop and some cocoa. Plus! Extra room for guests.

We’ve since moved a fourth bookcase (this one small and low) into place behind the sofa. We’ve got one more to move downstairs, as well, at which point he can start filling the remaining space with books, figurines, whatever he’s decided to keep.

This means there’s now room in the attic to move the Glowforge and the little computer desk. Rather than having it take up a huge, awkward chunk of the studio, I can now just tote the laptop upstairs to do my cutting as needed.

The room has an inset closet that right now is being used as extra art storage. One of my goals this weekend is to really do a deep dive into the materials that I have and sell / trade away stuff that I know I’m not going to use. I have a hoarding problem with certain craft stuff, but realistically I know that a) it’s too much of a PITA to take out and use and b) there are other types of art that are more easily accessible and fun to use. Time to get rid of the excess.

The linocut stuff, for instance. I really enjoyed the hell out of it, but if I’m being honest it’s a fucking hassle from beginning to end. It makes a huge mess, making prints is a mess AND a headache and -- big surprise! -- nobody wants to buy the prints.

The bottom half of the closet will be art storage, and the top half will be more display. Marc has designs on making a kind of diorama display for his He-Man figures, which I think is just brilliant. It would be fun to do a whole painted backdrop for it!

Things are winding down in the garden. We have a couple handfuls of blackberries that are waiting to ripen, and I’m starting to eye up how I’m going to bring in the outdoor plants for the winter. It turns out that the elephant ear is going to have to get dug up and overwintered as a rhizome (!!!!), and I’m going to need to find somewhere to stash the brown turkey fig, as apparently both need to have a kind of winter dormancy to stay healthy. Lugging the latter up to the attic is not an option so, haha... this will be exciting.

We had a visitor in the back yard earlier this week, as well:

Marc was closing things up for bed when he called me downstairs. I saw it on the patio at first and was like, “Oh, is that another kitten!??”

Spolier alert: not a kitten.

I’d noticed a kind of hollow dug under one of our fence panels, and I guess now we know what made it. He was very polite, took a few bites of cat food and then went on about his way. Hopefully he and Fidget give each other a wide berth, as I don’t relish having to give a tomato juice bath to a half-feral cat.

Rosie was VERY excited, however, and I think a little put out that we didn’t let her play with / consume it.

My worries about giving her Panacur were unfounded, by the way. We mixed it into some baby food, added in a little juice from a can of chunked chicken, and she inhaled it. We’ve since had to give her some apparently nasty-tasting pills, and as long as it is located somewhere in her bowl she doesn’t even pause for breath. It’s gone in seconds.

She continues to be amazing and wonderful.

#oc #home improvement #adventure #cats

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magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/the-flux-beamo-is-a-1500-laser-cutter-with-simple-but-powerful-software/

The Flux beamo is a $1,500 laser cutter with simple but powerful software

Laser cutters are in a fun place right now. Gone are the days when the cheapest machines were tens of thousands of dollars, and when the “compact” models were roughly the size of a freezer. They’ve gotten affordable enough, and small enough, that a DIY home hobbyist can add it to their toolset without taking out a second mortgage or needing much more than some desk space… but they’re still a rare enough machine that saying “I’ve got a laser cutter!” makes people look at you like you’re a friggin’ wizard.

One of the latest entries into this space is beamo, a compact, 30W laser cutter and engraver built by Flux — a Taiwan-based team you might remember for raising $1.6 million on Kickstarter with its Flux Delta 3D printer/scanner/engraver back in 2014.

As with Delta, Flux is turning to Kickstarter for the launch of beamo. They sprinted past their goal of $25,000 pretty quickly, currently sitting at roughly $350,000 raised with a little over a week to go. The early-bird models are going for $849, with the company pinning the final MSRP at $1,500. Shipping/taxes aren’t included in those prices, and can cost a couple hundred bucks, so factor that in to any purchasing decisions.

While I tend to be a bit hesitant when it comes to crowdfunded hardware (having been burned too many times by products that either never arrived or did arrive only to be total garbage), Flux has been down this road before; in addition to Delta, it also crowdfunded and shipped Beambox (a slightly bigger, pricier, but more powerful laser cutter) just a few months back. In the case of beamo, it seems like the Kickstarter is primarily meant to help get the word out, rather than literally “kickstarting” the process. Production is already underway, and units are already rolling off the line.

Flux sent me one of those early units to check out for a few weeks. I haven’t had it long enough to do what I’d call a “review”; with things like laser cutters with their myriad moving parts and… you know, lasers, new issues can pop up months after you open the box, as components wear and maintenance is required. So consider this more of a “first impressions” kind of thing.

My first impressions, though, are good.

For reference, I’d classify myself laser experience as… moderate. More than most people you’d randomly ask, I’d wager, but less than if it were my job. I’ve put a hundred hours or so into training/creating with those aforementioned freezer-sized pro lasers, making everything from custom etched pint glasses, to bespoke Christmas ornaments, to personalized rubber stamps over the years. I tend to look for excuses to shoot lasers at things.

Getting it running

My beamo unit came ready to go right out of the box, mirrors aligned, moving parts all lubed up. I plugged it in, set up some basic ventilation, ran through about 10 minutes of software installation and configuration and started firing away. It all just worked on the first shot.

Speaking of ventilation: you’ll need it. Laser cutting is basically a tiny, super controlled fire… and that means smoke. Depending on what you’re cutting, that smoke can be super noxious. Cutting wood? It won’t smell too bad, but it’s still not something you want in your lungs on the regular. Etching a logo into felt? It’ll smell like you’re burning a trash can full of hair. Beamo uses a 200CFM exhaust fan to pull smoky air out of the machine, dumping it out through a 4″ exhaust hose that you’ll need to run through a window (or, if you’re feeling extra fancy, a dryer exhaust-style vent through a wall.) Expect to need about 8″ of clearance between the machine and any wall behind it for the exhaust hose and its bends, unless the path to the window is a straight shot.

The exhaust system is decent, but you’ll probably need to fiddle with how the hose runs to get it just right. If you’re venting through a window, you’ll want to figure out a way of sealing up the open gaps around the hose to limit any fumes that might float back into the room. Put time into getting it right. If the room still smells smokey hours after you’ve cut, you’ll want to keep working on your ventilation. You don’t want to breath that stuff in, especially if you’re running the laser more than occasionally.

Beamo’s built-in touchscreen. You’ll mostly control it over Wi-Fi, but you can access some basic functionality and monitor job progress here.

If you’re new to laser cutting, you should also put the time into learning what you shouldn’t put in these machines. Some materials are safe to laser cut, but tend to catch on fire easily. Some materials will just melt and screw up your machine. Other things (PVC!) will straight up emit chlorine gas when you hit them with a laser. If you’re moving beyond the basics of cutting thin wood/acrylic/cardboard or engraving glass, research it.

So what SHOULD you cut? Woods are a good go-to (though you’ll want to limit it to less oily stuff — because, again, fire). Cardboard is fun to cut for things like spray paint stencils. Leather is good, with practice, and you can do all sorts of really neat stuff with acrylic. You can’t cut glass, but you can engrave it; same goes for rubber, though that’s one you’ll want to source from a place that sells materials known to be laser safe.

The thickness of the material you can cut tends to be limited by a laser’s wattage, while height/width is generally limited by the size of the work area. At 30W, beamo’s laser can slice its way through wood about 1/8″ thick; its work area, meanwhile, comes in at 11.81″ x 8.27″. You can make a lot of cool stuff within those bounds, but be aware of them — buying a bunch of material only to get it home and realize you’re a few watts short of a complete cut is a bummer. If you foresee needing deeper cuts or bigger pieces, beefier lasers exist without too massive a leap in price. As examples: Flux’s other laser cutter, the $2,500 Beambox, bumps the laser up to 40W and the work area up to 15.7″ x 14.7″; the $2,500 base model from competitor Glowforge comes in at 40W with a work area of roughly 11″ x 19.5″.

(One potential advantage of beamo over the company’s previously released Beambox: whereas Beambox requires you to regularly fill up a water cooling reservoir to keep it running, beamo’s water cooling is closed-loop, so the same water just keeps circulating. I’m interested to see how this holds up over time.)

Fire the lasers!

Got everything plugged in, ventilation set up and your materials purchased? Time to cut! Well, almost.

You’ll mostly be controlling beamo through Beam Studio, a free piece of software provided by Flux for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. As far as laser cutting software goes, I’m really quite pleased with it so far.

Beam Studio is super straightforward, but darn powerful for a free companion app. If you’re looking to cut out basic shapes, etch text or lay down some bezier curves, it can do it. Want to etch a picture of your dog into some wood to make a keychain? Just drop an image onto the work area, scale as desired, then move a slider to tweak the black/white threshold until it looks right. You can work in layers, setting up a raster layer to be etched and then a vector layer to cut it out immediately after.

Beamo has a built-in camera system, allowing you to quickly scan the work bed before dragging and dropping your designs wherever you want them. The first time you connect to beamo, you’ll be asked to calibrate the camera — a process that was considerably simpler than I expected. Put a piece of paper on the work bed, and beamo will fire a quick test pattern into it. Beam Studio will then snap a picture of what it just etched, projecting an overlay of where it thinks the test pattern is versus its scan. Nudge the overlay around until everything is perfectly stacked, and you’re set. You’ll want to re-run this alignment process every once in a while (it’s quick) if you need precise placement.

The camera system here really is incredibly useful. After about 30 minutes with beamo, I was doing things that are at best annoying on camera-less cutters — things like etching a design, cutting it out, then immediately flipping the cut piece and etching on the other side without worrying about precarious placement. I just rescanned the work bed, dragged the image where I wanted it on the freshly cut side B, and fired away.

The camera is quick, but not instant. Scanning the entire work area takes about 60 seconds. If you only need a certain area scanned (like, say, the top half of the work area, or the rough area around something you’ve already cut), fortunately, that’s an option. Just drag the scanning boundary box accordingly.

If you need to do something beyond what the free software can handle (or if you just prefer working in apps like CorelDraw or Illustrator), Beam Studio can import JPGs, PNGs and SVGs.

While more capable than I expected, the software isn’t without its quirks. Beam Studio will try to keep you updated with a progress ticker, but don’t rely on it too much for predicting timing. I’ve had projects shoot up to 40% in the first 30 seconds, only to take five minutes for the rest to complete. There was an occasion or two where the software threw out an error in Mandarin that I didn’t want to dismiss without a quick pass through Google Translate… but for the most part, it was solid, stable and fun to use.

In its base configuration, beamo’s laser is manually focused, meaning you’ll need to focus things by hand each time you place new material inside the machine. Fortunately, focusing it is super straightforward: put material in, rotate a piece of acrylic attached to the laser head, lower the laser head until the acrylic is just barely touching the material, then lock the laser head back in place and lift the acrylic out of the way.

Flux says that it’ll ship a $250 add-on module that introduces autofocus to the mix, but I didn’t get to test that. They’re also working on a $499 rotary add-on that will let you etch designs onto cylindrical items (think shot/pint glasses), but out of the box, it’s flat stuff only.

As with every single laser I’ve ever worked with, working with a new material — or even, sometimes, the same material from a different source — requires some fiddling. You’ll be tweaking the speed at which the laser moves, the power of the laser and how many passes it makes over the same path; you want to keep the power low enough to minimize scorching and maximize the life of the laser, while making sure you’ve done enough repeat passes to cut completely through. Beam Studio comes with a bunch of presets for different materials that can get you pretty close (and you can save your own favorites, once you’ve found them), but expect to experiment a little when you’re working with a new material for the first time. Buy extra material.

As for noise: operating with fans running full force, it’s not what I’d call “quiet,” but it’s not so loud that it’s uncomfortable to sit next to. The company’s specs pin it at around 65 db — louder than your average conversation, but a bit quieter than, say, a vacuum. The fans do whir endlessly when the machine is idling, so you’ll probably want to cut the power between cutting sessions.

If for some reason you need to open the lid while the laser is operating, beamo’s built-in automatic kill switch will cut power to the laser to protect your eyes. Close the lid again and the job can be resumed right from where you left off. While the company says that the acrylic lid provides sufficient eye protection for beamo’s 30W Class 1 laser (though they note that you shouldn’t stare right at the laser beam, lid or not), I absolutely recommend picking up and wearing a pair of CO2 laser safety goggles, especially when it comes time to pop the machine open and do any maintenance. Speaking of…

Foreseeable maintenance

Maintenance is an inevitable part of owning a laser cutter. As noted, I’ve only had the laser set up for a few weeks and everything came well configured, so I haven’t had to go digging under the hood yet. If something suddenly breaks on me during my time with the cutter, I’ll update this post accordingly. But either way, maintenance will be part of the process for owners.

Even if nothing breaks unexpectedly, some of the parts involved are “consumable” and thus expected to wear down with use. The lens, mirror and laser tube, for example, are expected to last about a year with regular use, according to the company’s estimates. The team says those parts should cost about $19, $9 and $139 to replace, respectively, and you’ll be able to buy them through their online store. Plan ahead for those recurring costs, and make sure you’re comfortable with the idea of eventually tearing the machine apart before you dive in.

You’ll also need to keep things clean to keep them operating well. Burning stuff dirties the optics, and dirty optics lead to weaker cuts and faster wear. You’ll want to pop the work bed out regularly to get rid of any debris, and keep all the moving bits lubed. There’s more to keeping a laser cutter working well than say, an inkjet printer.

Overall, though, so far so good. The machine looks pretty great on a table; it’s not quite as shiny and Apple-y as a Glowforge, but it should blend into a home office or studio pretty easily. It’s light enough to be easily moved by two people, and took me all of a few minutes to get up and running. If you don’t mind the occasional software hiccup, can figure out sufficient ventilation, are mostly working on projects that fit within beamo’s wattage/work area capabilities and are down to get under the hood for maintenance, beamo seems like a solid machine so far.

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