Has anyone here tried to build a laser cutter here that is 130 watts or greater? I’m beginning to look (with no IMMEDIATE intention of purchasing) some good Chinese distributors who supply CO2 tubes and power supplies for those and doing some comparison shopping.
There’s also other vital parts I’d have to buy as well (optics, etc).
I’ve done 130W. Used RECI hardware, pretty much best you can get at a reasonable price in China right now.
@Arthur_Wolf Thanks Arthur! Can you give me an idea of what that will allow you to do? Got some examples of your work?
And do you remember the distributor?
I want to make sure it easily cuts through all wood. I’m pretty sure I cannot afford the power of one that cuts metal. If I ever decide to go that route, I’ll probably get a plasma cutter.
Also, was it difficult setting up the optics?
@George_Allen About what it allows you to do, pretty much what you’d expect from any laser cutter in the 50W+ range, cut and engrave most woods, some plastics, leather, cork, the list goes on quite a bit. Just no metal cutting. The fact it’s 130W mostly changes the fact that it cuts much faster and deep cuts are much cleaner. I believe you can start doing very thin steel if you get a 150W tube and a pure oxygen intake, but I don’t think 130W is quite there ( and 150 has a lot of caveats I think ).
The distributor was RECI themselves, they sell directly to you. They are well known in china for producing high quality tubes, and were the first to offer long life tubes ( 10k hours instead of the classic 2k ). Most chinese laser cutters except for the very cheapest ones use RECI nowadays.
@Arthur_Wolf very cool! How has business been? Smoothie boards are excellent! Does the software use Marlin or something else?
@George_Allen I’m you think Smoothieboards are excellent, but don’t know about Smoothie firmware, you are missing the best part of the whole thing 
http://smoothieware.org
Is RECI the pigtail or is that just a type of tube? And do you use nitrogen or compressed air or something else?
RECI is a company that sells laser tubes and laser power supply.
http://www.recilaser.com/en/
On my machines I do the standard setup : weak compressed air to help with smoke removal from the cutting spot and to provide a bit of O2 to combustion. Could easily do N2 or pure O2 too if needed, but that’s overkill for most normal laser cutter uses.
Isn’t there a danger using oxygen?
Well, air is 20% oxygen, so the danger is the same, just more prononced. A laser cutter is a machine that burns things, you just want to make sure that burning stays controlled ( and the smoke is evacuated properly ). Adding more O2 is the same as adding more power mostly : the cutting is more powerful, and in some materials fires can happen. Just have to monitor the work and know what you are doing.
I’ve got a lot to learn before I get into it. But it’s all very interesting to me; and challenging.
Just got to be careful if you are using pure O2…that’ll blow like ether.
Fascinating stuff…thanks for the info
Jumping in lately and may be diverging a little but… Would you have a good resource to share to educate myself about the various types of laser technologies?
Thanks in advance
@Jeremie_Tarot You can get the basic ideas about laser as well as 3D printing on http://reprap.org. Also, on the net there’s something called laser web. http://reprap.org