Here is one tool company (Laguna Tools), that traditionally makes high-end woodworking machines and great CNC machines, just entering the laser cutter/engraver market.
I did watch their video though, covering the alignment of the optics, and I have to say that the Glowforge with its promised pre-adjusted/aligned optics that are locked in for good, sounds much better. Provided, of course that all starts well and stays well adjusted.
Interesting. From the video, it looks substantially built. Also, you can double the bed size to 24 by 20 for less than $700. It wasn’t clear to me if the base price includes the chiller and air assist. Looks like it doesn’t handle SVG file formats which is a deal killer for me. It is still GF for me! It will be interesting to see what is available in about 5 years for hobbyist like me from all the vendors.
And if you take the numbers literally in their material chart, the 40w doesn’t even hit 1/4" on most materials. Although it does say it rasters all those metals, but you’d think there should be a “*requires Cermark or similar” sort of statement there.
I did not see the Z specs either @johnwills. Laguna also has a $500 discount coupon hiding on one of their webpages if you happen onto the correct page on their site. Maybe one of us will find it while we peruse their site for the Z spec!!!
The really interesting thing is that they’re also offering 100W for not that much more than the base price. They have a good name (and apparently a bunch of other way bigger lasers) but …
It mentions “etc.”. I would be very surprised that if it’s handling native AI and DWG files, as well as DXF (which was designed for exchange/interoperability of DWG), it wouldn’t handle SVGs.
Yes, @jbmanning5, it would seem logical but unless stated, I am always suspicious!!! I did not see the etc, guess I should have looked more closely!!! Thanks!!
On the software side vs hardware, AI, in my opinion does not handle SVG files, but they state in their literature (can’t remember where) that they do. However, AI only handles what I consider small SVG’s, bogs down with medium size ones and bombs out completely with larger ones (around 200 megs and up).
I also really need the GF camera and registration capability which
@jbmanning5 I work with geographic data. The files are large. 250 megs is small. Some of them are several gigs when I work with large raster files. Here is one SVG I use on a regular basis, it is only 207.5 megs. :-)))
It is one of several master files that are used to generate smaller working files. Adobe Illustrator completely choked on this one. I think I damaged their Cloud service! :-)))
P.S. Affinity Designer handled it easily. Inkscape handled it but took a couple minutes to open it. If you own Adobe stock, get out soon, Affinity could put them out of business! :-)))
I turned off some of the polygon layers so you could see the detail in the vector lines. For everything you see as lines, there are additional polygon themes too. This is just a portion of one country in the World and some countries are much larger!
I think that’s an assumption everyone is making. FSL was an importer who then reworked the machines when they arrived onshore to fix them up before sending them out under their own label.
It makes sense that they would use Chinese manufacturing (hey, remember that someone here was going to go offshore for mfg until this spring’s delay announcement and the change to onshore ). They could well have spec’ed the machine and had some company in China do the build. I don’t think that’s the same as a K40 level machine re-brand though. I wouldn’t be afraid of using them just because they’re (likely) built in China. I have other issues with them. (Support mostly.)
There are World, US Continental and individual state map files available on the site. All map layers are registered and organized hierarchically which gives flexibility to produce the exact product you want with your laser machine.
). They could well have spec’ed the machine and had some company in China do the build. I don’t think that’s the same as a K40 level machine re-brand though. I wouldn’t be afraid of using them just because they’re (likely) built in China. I have other issues with them. (Support mostly.)