Hi everyone,
I would like to get myself smaller laser cutter for home use for simpler projects so if you have experience, your advices and recommendations would be highly appreciated.
Here is what I would like to be able to do with it:
- cut plywood and chipboard up to 5mm of thickness,
- cut acrylic up to 4 (max 5) mm of thickness,
- cut other thinner materials like fabric, leather, paper, cardboard.
Here are some constraints:
- I am looking to spend up to 500€ maybe 600€ (~650US$),
- I am in Europe so only suppliers from Chine that can be found on alibaba platform are available to me,
- this will be a home-use machine for occasional use, so no need for heavy use servos and expensive parts,
- working area of about 40 x 30 cm will be sufficient (50x40cm would be ideal),
- I would like a bit better/stronger laser module so it would not have to make too many passes to cut, cutting 3mm plywood in 1 pass would be perfect (and 5mm in 2 passes),
- it would be great if it wouldn’t leave a charred edge.
Regarding a software for laser cutter: I did have the opportunity to use a larger CO2 laser at my place of work, I made all designs in Adobe Illustrator as vectors and then load it into RDWorks, I could draw several designs on one project, make them in different colors and then define in RDWorks parameters like power output, speed for each color individually, so I could engrave, do shallow cutting and cutting through in one project.
Would be excellent to have those options on home-use machine.
Thanks in advance