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Chinese Laser engraver for marking and engraving

Corn

Aluminum
Joined
Nov 3, 2019
Dear All,

I’m tempted in buying 50W fiber laser engraving machine and would like to hear some thoughts about them. I’ve particularly interested on Chinese table top, non closure with JPT LP E-50W laser emitter and around $5000 price range. I’ve watched few review videos from YT and they seem to get mostly positive feedback. Are these generally how long lasting devices? Also I’m concerned about the safety and have few doubts. I’m not sure is it even allowed to sell any non enclosed laser engravers/markers in EU. With the enclosure it would be easier to extract the fumes. How bad are the fumes when engraving AL, ST/ST or some plastics which can be engraved by fiber laser or is it the same than welding them? PVC at least is big no no. Is it enough to vent the fumes through HEPA filter or must vent them outside? For eyes, is it enough to wear the laser safety goggles?

JPT seem to have frequency range from 1-600kHz. Others ~20-60kHz. Does wider frequency range allow more material variety?

Thank you in advance
 
I have a 50w jpt open machine w/rotory .
Used for aluminums. Steels and stainless steels.
Also cut cardboard with it. Not supposed to work but it does.

50w is nice for deep engraving. Or for large work areal 10x10”
Otherwise save some bucks and go 20-30. Most people do not need 50w

Chinese lasers are cheap and easy to buy. Software is so so. And expect little to no customer support or warranty. YouTube laser master academy. Alex is a big help over there.

If you got time to F around. Chinese is not a bad route.
If you want any support at all your gonna need a much more $$$ vendor. But the major brands will have your back,

Ventilation is a must your vaporizing or ablading materials into a micro fine dust.
Hepa should be fine. I vent it outside after a filter just to be safe.
As an example the dust from ablading aluminum is as fine as talcum powder.
Vision. They say the shields or glasses are fine. Personally if I have a lot of engraving to do I toss a physical barrier in the way.

Frequency’s. It depends on what you wanna do. 20-80k variations are perfect for metals/engraving.
The jpt 2-600 will open up engraving some plastics. 400-600 let me cut cardboard. 300-400/defocus did a nice aneel on stainless.

Overall very happy. Quality of engraving is great. Speed is great.
Setup/learning curve sucked.
Got maybe 300hours laser on time. No problems at all.
Great for blasting my logo all over everything.
 
I have a 50w jpt open machine w/rotory .
Used for aluminums. Steels and stainless steels.
Also cut cardboard with it. Not supposed to work but it does.

50w is nice for deep engraving. Or for large work areal 10x10”
Otherwise save some bucks and go 20-30. Most people do not need 50w

Chinese lasers are cheap and easy to buy. Software is so so. And expect little to no customer support or warranty. YouTube laser master academy. Alex is a big help over there.

If you got time to F around. Chinese is not a bad route.
If you want any support at all your gonna need a much more $$$ vendor. But the major brands will have your back,

Ventilation is a must your vaporizing or ablading materials into a micro fine dust.
Hepa should be fine. I vent it outside after a filter just to be safe.
As an example the dust from ablading aluminum is as fine as talcum powder.
Vision. They say the shields or glasses are fine. Personally if I have a lot of engraving to do I toss a physical barrier in the way.

Frequency’s. It depends on what you wanna do. 20-80k variations are perfect for metals/engraving.
The jpt 2-600 will open up engraving some plastics. 400-600 let me cut cardboard. 300-400/defocus did a nice aneel on stainless.

Overall very happy. Quality of engraving is great. Speed is great.
Setup/learning curve sucked.
Got maybe 300hours laser on time. No problems at all.
Great for blasting my logo all over everything.
We bought one from Amazon with rotary we use it all the time we bought light burn to program way better then the standard softwareE1D6FD46-B9D0-485A-B35B-B9DD3A50726C.jpeg
 
Last edited:
That was .07 deep about 8 hours burn time run on max than 45 percent 45 freq and 1000 mm-s to clean the floors up. Then surface grind the top about .002. They are for a hot stamp die for oil filler caps
Don
 
We bought one from Amazon with rotary we use it all the time we bought light burn to program way better then the standard softwareView attachment 375739


How do you get lightburn to talk to the machine?

I bought a 100w Chinese fiber laser a few years ago before the huge price hikes and have used it for some markings and logo engraving, but its painful to learn. Haven't had much time to play with it but would love something easier to program it with.
 
How do you get lightburn to talk to the machine?

I bought a 100w Chinese fiber laser a few years ago before the huge price hikes and have used it for some markings and logo engraving, but its painful to learn. Haven't had much time to play with it but would love something easier to program it with.
Look up “laser everything” on YouTube. Fella names Alex is putting out great content for these fiber lasers
How much was your 100W
I got my 50 2 years ago I thing? Was 5500cdn with the rotory incl. if I remember correct

100 would be sick!
 
Look up “laser everything” on YouTube. Fella names Alex is putting out great content for these fiber lasers
How much was your 100W
I got my 50 2 years ago I thing? Was 5500cdn with the rotory incl. if I remember correct

100 would be sick!

I paid the same $5500 all in with 2 lenses, a rotary and shipping/taxes Canadian for the 100W I think maybe 3.5 years ago or so, before Covid messed things up. Bought it off Alibaba. Its a JW JingWei Laser. Looks like all the other Silver and blue anodized machines
 
I paid the same $5500 all in with 2 lenses, a rotary and shipping/taxes Canadian for the 100W I think maybe 3.5 years ago or so, before Covid messed things up. Bought it off Alibaba. Its a JW JingWei Laser. Looks like all the other Silver and blue anodized machines
Looking back.
I paid 4300 in March 2021. That includes shipping
50w jpt Laser was 3620 before shipping

Man a 100w for 5500 woulda been sweet. Looking around $9000 now
 
Well I just bought a JPT 50 watt 300mmx300mm engraver for $2500 on AliExpress (I prefer express over baba whenever possible due to seller being responsible for shipping on express). Hopefully it works well. I'll know in a month.
 
Coming back to this topic as I finally managed to buy the laser. It’s JPT MOPA M7 60W with rotary. It was easy to setup and get the Lightburn to work as well. It came with the settings for the supplied 175x175mm lens. Also the Chinese seller promised to give support and gave direct contact details so I was confident in buying this. Now that I’ve played around with it for a while I started to tweak things and noticed how bad the mechanical quality actually is. First of all I had to shim the laser head 0.6mm for it to be in level with the bed as well as shim the tower 0.2mm to be square with the bed. This is important as it throws your focus off on at least on bigger lenses from one side to the other.

Then the second thing was the rotary. It really amazes me how they even achieve to screw things up so badly. There was horrible wobble on the rotary. Measured the chuck faceplate with dial indicator to have 0.6mm throw. Turned it straight and now was able to reduce the throw to be around 0.4mm from 100mm distance from the chuck face. That’s due to bad chuck, but it is acceptable as being so small it won’t affect the laser focus to make any differences.

Fortunately all these were mechanical issues and easy to fix. But still $5000 machine you would expect it to be good, but no..
 
Coming back to this topic as I finally managed to buy the laser. It’s JPT MOPA M7 60W with rotary. It was easy to setup and get the Lightburn to work as well. It came with the settings for the supplied 175x175mm lens. Also the Chinese seller promised to give support and gave direct contact details so I was confident in buying this. Now that I’ve played around with it for a while I started to tweak things and noticed how bad the mechanical quality actually is. First of all I had to shim the laser head 0.6mm for it to be in level with the bed as well as shim the tower 0.2mm to be square with the bed. This is important as it throws your focus off on at least on bigger lenses from one side to the other.

Then the second thing was the rotary. It really amazes me how they even achieve to screw things up so badly. There was horrible wobble on the rotary. Measured the chuck faceplate with dial indicator to have 0.6mm throw. Turned it straight and now was able to reduce the throw to be around 0.4mm from 100mm distance from the chuck face. That’s due to bad chuck, but it is acceptable as being so small it won’t affect the laser focus to make any differences.

Fortunately all these were mechanical issues and easy to fix. But still $5000 machine you would expect it to be good, but no..
Purchased a 50W unit in December '22 and I guess the differance in price of $5K versus $15K between a direct from China versus one from a U.S. company is in tech support, or lack there of, and shaking out various glitches as there must be some level of pre-delivery inspection and adjustment.

Don't use a rotary so for minor concave/convex surfaces have been using the Lithtburn settings for curved surfaces. Seems to work OK for minor stuff.
 
Purchased a 50W unit in December '22 and I guess the differance in price of $5K versus $15K between a direct from China versus one from a U.S. company is in tech support,

Nah, he just came here specifically to snivel. Probably doesnt even own one, just looked at one at a friend's house so he could find something to criticize. What other helpful stuff has he posted here ? Is he a real user ir just a sales guy for a place that buys these for 3500 to sell for 7500 ? The post is mostly bee ess.

Seems to work OK for minor stuff.
Thats pretty much what everyone else says, too. Nobody is claiming they are a $20,000 laser, they are inexpensive tools for light use and seems like the people who actually buy them are happy. So ... if you are in the "china is communist junk" battalion this post will make you happy. If you are an actual machinist you'll recognize crap when you read it.
 
No worries, you can call me liar or whatever you want. However I don’t have any need to promote anything here or have any affiliation to anything. I’m sorry if you felt that my post was crap. Was just telling my experience and maybe frustration behind it.

I remembered wrong it was not 0.6mm shim that had to be added to laser head, it was ~1.2mm. Used what I had on hand at that moment which was aluminum cards thickness of 0.4mm and three of them did the job.

What comes to the rotary chuck backplate. It wouldn’t necessarily be any more expensive to turn it true in the first place if they’ve designed the work holding correctly.

So as a takeaway of this BS post from a useless poster, no matter how cheaply you try to do something, you should have at least bit of a pride of your work to at least do what you’re doing the best you can with the given resources.
 

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I'm sure all of these are made in the same one or two factories (a blue factory and a red factory apparently)
For people who have bought these, how did you pick which "brand" to buy? Do you actually get any support for it?

If all I have to be wary of is maybe adding a few shims to square up the laser head that seems to be worth saving $10k vs buying a repackaged one that comes with a nice shiny "USA support" sticker, so I'm willing to take the risk...
 
I'm sure all of these are made in the same one or two factories (a blue factory and a red factory apparently)
Actually, no. There must be twenty places making this type of thing. If you haven't actually seen it, the volumes of a place with five times as many people as the US is kind of a shock. And they encourage smaller local companies rather than letting it all consolidate into one or two big names.

If all I have to be wary of is maybe adding a few shims to square up the laser head that seems to be worth saving $10k vs buying a repackaged one that comes with a nice shiny "USA support" sticker, so I'm willing to take the risk...
Yeah, that's how I feel about it. He went to the dollar store and bought a can opener then complained that the handles were flimsy, the cutter teeth were .020" non-concentric, the holes in the handle weren't the same size. I can appreciate people who want perfection, but in that case go to Williams-Sonoma. Don't save $10,000 then snivel about doing a little tuneup, imo.
 
I'm sure all of these are made in the same one or two factories (a blue factory and a red factory apparently)
For people who have bought these, how did you pick which "brand" to buy? Do you actually get any support for it?

If all I have to be wary of is maybe adding a few shims to square up the laser head that seems to be worth saving $10k vs buying a repackaged one that comes with a nice shiny "USA support" sticker, so I'm willing to take the risk...
The "Galvos" seem to be pretty much a commodity item with prices all about the same based on power output. After looking at what other were using to mark steel parts I bought a 50W galvo off Ebay for $3,200. The supplied EZCAD software defied my lack of computer skills so I added Lightburn for $150. and replace the supplied marginal safety eyewear for an additional $75.
You need to figure out what your gonna use it for and how much power you need which will show you what it's going to cost. Beyond that using your credit card and buying off a site that offers customer protection is about all the risk mitigating your gonna get.
 








 
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