Considering my first laser purchase and saw these on tech TV a while back.. any feed back?
Basically want to do trophies, parts and tools the occasional wine glass. Also what sort of software is required?
We just got our versa laser 200 and you need to buy Corel 11 to run the program.
To do wine glasses you will need to buy a rotary fixture. We are brand new to this so we really can’t answer many questions at this time. But so far we think this is great!
Well versalaser is made by ULS which is a pretty good company. The VL has a 12×24 worktable which is equal to one of their larger M-series lasers. 25 watts is perfect for engraving trophies and glass and most materials. It is not powerful enough to cut through woods and acrylics except in multiple passes (which can cause lots of smoke damage). It looks fairly transportable which is a good thing. It’s already been mentioned that you will need the rotary fixture for doing glassware. Corel Draw is used by a lot of engravers, but Adobe Illustrator can also be used. In fact most any vector program can be used. They just tie into the print driver provided by ULS. Have fun!
I have a different brand but there all basically give similar results. A laser engraver is able to concentrate a lot of laser energy into a very small dot and precisely place those dots. The laser uses a lens to focus the light. The focal point is pretty limited so whatever you want to use the laser on it must be near level (within 1/4 inch). TO get around this with wine glasses or bottles you need a rotary tool.
The laser cuts and engraves by vaporizing and/or burning the material. You need an exhaust fan to the outside to take the fumes away. Depending on what your doing the fumes may smell. If the fumes smell and your laser are located where someone will complain then you need to get some sort of odor filter. Leather smells bad when it is burned. Rubber can also be stinky. Acrylic has a sweet sort of odor. Wood smells like a fireplace. Glass and stone are virtually odor free.
The ability of the laser to engrave material varies widely. Glass only etches fair, not near as nice as sand carved but the laser can also be used to cut a sand blasting resist design. Too much power on glass makes it chip off in sharp shards. The laser is totally unable to directly engrave metal but there are metal marking paints that you can for example spray on a tool, then have the laser mark on top of the marking material then wash off the tool. Wherever the laser hit the marking material it will be permanently fused with the tool. Only certain types of wood take an image, other wood need some sort of paint fill to bring the engraving out. Plastics generally need to be made special for laser engraving where one color is laminated on another and the laser burns off the top layer. PVC based plastic is toxic to lasers and need to be avoided. Check out www.laserbits.com to get an idea of what’s out there.
The laser shows up to windows as a standard printer. Corel draw is what they test the driver with. I’ve got the laserpro which suffers many driver bugs so any program other than corel be sure you test before you buy. The laser interprets the hairline as being a vector cut line. Fills are etched as raster images.
Be realistic with your expectations. To cut a sheet of acrylic into 150 pieces takes over 6 hours. It takes 10 minutes to raster image 1 square foot at 125 dpi and could take over an hour at 1,000 dpi. Higher powered lasers can reduce those times but with the way lasers are priced quite often you’re just as well off getting a second machine as to buy one twice as strong. You should be pricing work at $50-100 per hours so laser products are not cheap.