How To Set Up a Laser Engraver Step by Step

We just did a complete setup of this industrial laser and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do a Build it or Make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. This week we're dusting off an old flame. Literally. Craft season is in full peak production mode and we have a little bit smaller but yet still industrial size laser just sitting in the corner not doing anything. So this week we've got to get that thing set up and get it participating in some production so that we can produce more product so we can get some money at these craft shows. He's been like the Harry Potter of lasers under the stairs. We're going to do a complete setup. A to Z. Soup to nuts. Any other term that means beginning to end. We're going to do the entire install. Step one. We're going to gather all of our supplies. We added a couple of things because we're going to mod this thing out. We're going to make this thing a street rod. We are going to do a few improvements to make it cut a little bit better a little bit faster a little bit cleaner. Rev just a little bit. We're going to need a laser and the laser that we're going to use is an OM Tech 80 watt laser with a 24 by 35 inch bed and it's pretty bare bones. We also need an industrial chiller. It's a water chiller. We got this one on eBay for a great deal. We'll need some distilled water and if you have a hard time finding distilled water it's in the baby section. We'll also need some algae control because algae loves hot dark water. We also need an air compressor for air assist and some pneumatic connectors and hose. It's mainly for the quick connects. We're going to need exhaust so we're using a portable dust collector that we got from Harbor Freight. We also needed a couple of reducers because the back is six inches and we're going down to a four inch hose. For the dust collector and we needed some four inch hoses. We also need an industrial power strip. Now Garrett tried to use the girls pink corded power strip when we were at the house and that's not going to cut it. You need an industrial one. Step two. We're going to lay down the laser. We're just going to install the laser tube. Because we moved ours from home to the shop we had to remove the tube and carry it separately. You don't want to transport a laser like that with the tube installed unless you've got all the... Unless you got some kind of cushy air ride I guess. Well or some serious foam packing. Some of them come installed with foam packing but we didn't have that any longer so we removed ours and rode with it in our lap from the home to the shop. Our laser was riding in the brawl. We're going to start with removing the little panel on the rear right hand side of the machine. Right hand side if you're looking at the machine facing it. Now we're going to remove this because to slide the tube in the tube just fits inside so it needs to poke out a little bit to actually get all the way inside. We'll also use that little access door to finish installing the tube. You got to be real gentle. We're going to slide the back end of the tube in first into that little hole that we cut out that we just see. See how it's peeking out of a little back hole? A little window? And then we're going to center it on the brackets. Try to get that nice and centered. Keep it level or as you call it balanced. Each bracket has two screws and this little allen wrench comes with a little toolkit that comes with your laser. These don't need to be super tight. You just want to hand tighten these. You're not going to manhandle or toss your tube around and the laser around but you don't want it moving or shifting. Next we're going to hook the electrical back up. To move it I went ahead and cut the wire to the negative on the power supply so I just need to reconnect the negative. We're going to splice it back together wrap it with some electrical tape. You won't have to do this on a normal installation. This is just simply because we had to move it and there was no quick connect. Now we're going to take the positive end the little screw side and we're going to poke it through the hole that's at the back side of the laser tube. It's a little hole right below it. It's the access for the power supply so that we can power that tube. We're going to go in the side door and pull that down. Now we're just going to screw that together with the piece that's coming out of the power supply. A couple of twists screws right together you can't mess it up. Next we're going to add the water tubes back to the laser tube. This is the water outlet. The water comes out the same place the laser comes out and it goes in where the laser originates at the back of the tube. I'm going to use some zip ties to keep these in place. They have a little nub on the connector so I'm just going to use these zip ties and keep it nice and tight just to squeeze that rubber below the nub. I can do the same thing at the back of the laser tube that's why we left that little access door open. I'm just going to plug it up see the little nub squeeze that over and then put a zip tie over there below the nub squeezing the rubber. Hopefully it'll keep it from popping off the nub. That's some good camera angles right there. Yeah, thanks Kim. We're just going to close up the access door. We won't need this again. We should be done with this for the rest. And then we'll close up the laser tube. Step three, time to chill. I refuse to do that. We're going to install the water chiller. The water chiller ensures that the laser tube stays at an optimal operating temperature. I'm going to start by connecting our hoses so the water comes into the laser which is connected to the outlet of the water chiller and it's going to come out of the laser when it's used up and in to the water chiller. We're just sliding our little hoses over those ridge connectors. I don't know why I'm having such a hard time getting it on there. And then we're going to add those zip ties back on. You do not want hoses to pop off. It's happened to us. It was like a water fountain. It was a mess. So you want to put it on tight enough so that the rubber grips those little nubs on the ends. We're going to add the power connector to our industrial power strip. We're going to add a little bit of the algae control. Just a couple of drops, a little squeeze. I'm not even going to measure. And then look at me go. I'm going to add one and two thirds gallon of distilled water without a funnel. Look at very little spillage. Very little spillage. I'm like a pouring pro. And then you can see on the back there's a great little indicator here that shows that we're full of distilled water with very little spillage. Right, better get that paper towel. We're going to turn it on and 19.2 degrees Celsius. Well, let's see what it's set to. 22.9 degrees Celsius. That's about 72 degrees Fahrenheit. That's room temperature. We'll leave that for now. We're going to check the tube for any bubbles and we're just going to squeeze one of the tubes to change the water pressure to loosen any bubbles that might be stuck inside. Yeah, you're looking right inside that laser tube. You can see the water flowing through it and you'll be able to see if there's a bubble in there. Step four. We're blowing this popsicle stand. We're really just adding the air assist, which will help clear the smoke and debris and help that laser actually hit the material and cut right through it. And that's really going to keep that air blowing so that the laser has some really nice clean cuts to it. Now, this was the original air assist. You could use the tube coming out of the top of that, but we chose to run a separate tube up from the bottom in through the power connections and alongside the original hose. I just zip tied it to the little track there. Looking back, I probably should have just spliced it into the other hose. This was our original upgrade. It's an air pump for a pond. But that didn't do it. So now we're going to use a full size air compressor. That should give me a more consistent airflow and a little higher air pressure to get a cleaner cut and to get the smoke and debris out of the way a little faster and a little bit easier. This is a quick connect for the air hose. I'm using quick connects because I might swap things out later or add a moisture catcher. The air tube goes right into the quick connect. Now we're going to plug the air compressor into the back of the power strip on the laser. And this is the power cable for the laser going into the industrial power strip. Now we're going to adjust the PSI going to the laser. We're going to set that at about 20. I found that to be good for me. Step five, smoke them if you got them. Or actually remove the smoke if you have it. We're going to add the exhaust to get all the smoke and keep that air clean so it doesn't have any smoke getting in the way of the beam. We're going to start by reducing the reducer. The six to five inch reducer was still a little too big for the hole coming out of the back of the laser. So I'm going to add some slits around the six inch side and then I'm going to use a hose clamp. Try to get that to grip onto the little hole, the little nub that comes out of the back of the laser. It worked pretty good. I gave it a couple of tugs. It was on there. Then we're going to add that five inch to four inch reducer and seal it up with some duct tape so there's no smoke that would leak through there. We'll use a hose clamp to clamp the four inch hose onto that last reducer. I love that this dust collector is on wheels. It makes it so easy to move around. It's almost modular. We're going to use the little clamps to secure the hose to the dust collector. And I got smart and used a drill this time instead of trying to do it with a screwdriver. And we're going to plug it into the back of the laser. Step six, time to give it an alignment. Put it up on the rack. Let's see if all of the mirrors and laser tube are all aligned so we get a nice clean beam to the material. Now, this is the tricky part of setting up an industrial size laser is making sure that you have those mirrors aligned. This can sometimes be a long process and take a while to do because you have to adjust three different mirrors and then the laser. The focus height. Yeah, the focus height itself. We're just going to turn everything on. We'll turn on the air compressor. We'll turn on the exhaust fan. Well, I mean, we are ready to go. Power this up. Oh, I think I just blew a fuse. No problem. I've done this before. I've learned my lesson. The fuse is underneath the plug. You just pop it out and then we can check to see if I blew the fuse. It is definitely it's definitely blown. Look at that. We're just going to run over to the hardware store and we're we'll have to pick up some fuses because I've already used the spare fuse. I've done this before. Now, this fuse is just a little bit smaller than the fuse that comes out. So I have to hold it and try to wiggle it into place. That's a spare fuse. He's putting back in there. Yeah, I'm putting back a spare fuse just in case. Watch, I drop it here in a second. Yeah, see, I had to hold it to get it back in there. The holder was just a little too big. Then I ended up plugging everything into that heavy duty power strip and we are good to go. Look at that. Like a thing of beauty. Step seven, alignment. We're actually going to align it this time. Now that we got it figured out. We're going to start by bringing the max power down to about 20%. So we'll go into menu, select max power and both max power one and two. We're going to bring down to 20%. Could be a little dangerous firing these things off at 90% or 100%. So for safety reasons and to make a smaller hole in our tape, we're going to bring it down to 20%. We're going to use this clear packing tape and we're going to put this over the mirror so we can see where the laser beam pulses and intersects at the mirror. We're going to start at the back mirror or mirror number one closest to the tube. We'll turn it on. Give it a quick pulse. Just tap the button. Now let's go see what we have. You always want to turn it back off before you open it. Safety. That looks pretty dead center. If it wasn't dead center and you did have to adjust it, you'd adjust it using the brackets that are holding the laser tube. The brackets that we originally screwed it down to. We'll just adjust those up and down until we get it centered. Now for mirror number two, we're going to move the gantry halfway and place another piece of tape over mirror number two. This is the mirror on the left side of the gantry looking at the laser. And quick pulse. And you can see right where the laser beam intersected with the mirror and the tape. I mean, that looks pretty dead center too. This thing traveled fairly well. These are the screws that you will adjust if you do need to adjust the mirror. There's three brass screws and you just give them a little quarter turn. Now we're going to work on the laser head. We'll do the same thing. This is mirror number three and you can see it's off to the right just slightly. More than slightly. So I'm going to give a quarter turn to the screws on mirror number two. Give it another pulse. I'll give it another quarter turn and we'll change the tape. Let's give it another pulse. That looks pretty good. I mean, I guess it could come up and right but I think that's pretty good for now. Let's do the laser head. For the laser head I'm just going to put the piece of tape right on the bottom of the laser head and then I'm going to pulse it. This took me a while to dial it. I was a lot of quarter turns. This thing was way off but I would put the tape on the bottom. I would give it a pulse. Check it. Turn the screws. Put the tape at the bottom. Pulse. Check the screws. But I did get it. I did get it pretty centered. Look at that. Yeah, that looks good. Step eight. Time to turn and burn. We're going to connect our laser to the Lightburn software. This will be a new install so we're going to install the software kind of show you what that looks like. The Lightburn software is what you're going to use to make all of your cuts. That's kind of the front end. It's like the driver. It's like the driver of the laser. Laser is like the motor. It's the operating console. Yeah, it's the operating console. I like it. We're going to take the USB cable that came with the laser. We're going to plug it in the slot that says USB to PC and then we're going to plug the other end into our PC. I'm going to Google Lightburn. We're going to go right to download. I'm going to download the Windows 64-bit version because I'm on Windows 64-bit. I'm going to install. I'm just going to click all the defaults. Let it do its thing. When it opens up, it's going to ask you if you have a key or use the temp. I'm going to put my key in. The first thing I'm going to do is add my laser. I'm going to click devices. Go to find laser. I'm going to find the laser that I have. I'm going to use a serial USB. That way I have constant control and I'm not just sending packets. We'll name this blue laser. Now it's already read my bed size and everything for me. So that's great. I don't really have to put anything in. The next thing I'm going to do is go to edit settings and I'm going to make sure millimeters per second is checked, not millimeters per minute. That could burn some stuff up. Now let's draw a square and frame it out to see if we're actually talking to the laser. Now this is no power. That's just a little light. And all we're doing is seeing if it is talking. Yeah, and it's definitely talking. We are good to go. Step nine. We're going to get focused and do some testing. We're going to focus our lens from the material and then we'll do a test cut to make sure this thing is actually operational. So we're going to set the depth of that lens because we're using quarter inch MDF. We're going to see where the optimal focal length is by doing a ramp test. And that's what we're going to do in this next step. We're going to take that square and make it a long and skinny so that that laser has plenty of runway so that we'll be able to tell where it cuts through the best. I'm going to do 10 millimeters per second. Then I'm going to do 80% power on both max power and min power. I want one pass. We'll bring the laser power back up to 95% for both max one and two. Now let's go line up some materials. I'm going to stack two pieces of MDF and lay a long piece of MDF over top of those creating a ramp. Hence the name ramp test. I'm going to do a nice long cut down and back. Once it's complete, I'm going to check it out. I'm going to visually inspect it and see where it came through the best, where it cut all the way through, where the line was nice and tight, where there was the least amount of flashback. Once I think I have my point, I'm going to set it back up on those two pieces of MDF. Bring the laser head over. I'm going to use a triangle to find how far off of the board it is. I'm going to mark the triangle. Not even going to try to measure it. Remember number. I'm going to lay it flat, lay the triangle flat, and then raise the bed up to the laser head. That should be my focus height. Let's do a test cut. Now this is real time. So looks like it's cutting like butter. Look at the air system. There's very little smoke coming out of the top. Yeah, look at that. That's beautiful. Look at that. That looks great. Very little char on top. Very little flashback on the bottom and no schmutz on my fingers. I mean, Kim, that looks good. I think we are ready to go. I think so. Time to take it to production. All right, so what'd you think? Not that hard, was it? A little bit tedious, but fairly easy to get it going, right? Yeah, not too bad. The first time we ever had to do this, we were very nervous, very intimidated. Took me a whole day. I was going to say it took a full day. But this one, once you've done it a couple times, it is much easier. It's less intimidating. So I'm hoping if you're looking to upgrade your laser to a more industrial sized laser, maybe this video will help you and show you that that's not as scary as you might think it might be. No, it's kind of like kids. Like your first one, you really babied and your fourth one's eating dirt. It's pretty much the same. Well, big thanks to all of our patrons. We love you guys. Thank you so much for joining us. And we have a new Facebook page that's just for our top tier patrons. Yeah, we get a lot of questions on what is Patreon. So if you're not familiar with it, it's just another way to support your content creators. Over on Patreon, it's own application, patreon.com. We have a link to our particular profile in Patreon down below. You can join us over there. We provide additional content. Our top tier patrons get a monthly Zoom call where we chat with everyone. It's very informative. It's other small business owners and creators doing exactly what you're doing. Sharing tips, tricks, lessons learned. You get all of our past SVGs and future SVGs as part of the top tier patron group. And then you get one of these bad baseball teams. Yes. And don't forget, you get your own fancy Kim and Garrett baseball team. You can be part of the team. Well, we are about out of time. So if you're not going to join us for the patron after show, we will see you next time when we'll do it, build it and make it again. And there's absolutely nothing to balance. Everything is way too heavy.