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Laser engraver / cutter recommendations

Joined
Mar 16, 2017
Location
New Orleans LA
I'm looking for opinions on a laser engraver company. We need to engrave anodized aluminum, plastics (ABS, Delrin, etc.) and possibly some stainless. We would like to be able to do some light cutting of aluminum and plastics, but that is a secondary concern to the engraving. Max budget is $25k all in. I had looked into Full spectrum a while back as they had everything we wanted, but their customer reviews are terrible, support and reliability are a big concern. Epilog was another company we looked at, as we purchased one for another office and it's worked well, but we were hoping we could find something slightly less expensive.
 
IIRC Full Spectrum Lasers use a glass tube DC laser source and are basically a Chinese machine vs an RF tube laser source like Epilog which is US made. Engraving/cutting metals vs plastics is usually done with different wavelength lasers. You can get dual source lasers in one machine. Lasers are not cheap, especially ones that cut/directly engrave metal. I'm still new to the laser game. I got an Epilog, I only have a few hours on it. I need to find some work for it.
 
IIRC Full Spectrum Lasers use a glass tube DC laser source and are basically a Chinese machine vs an RF tube laser source like Epilog which is US made. Engraving/cutting metals vs plastics is usually done with different wavelength lasers. You can get dual source lasers in one machine. Lasers are not cheap, especially ones that cut/directly engrave metal. I'm still new to the laser game. I got an Epilog, I only have a few hours on it. I need to find some work for it.
Hey Goldenfab, what kind of capabilities do you have? Always need some laser work done.
 
Hey Goldenfab, what kind of capabilities do you have? Always need some laser work done.
I have an Epilog Mini 60W. I was outsourcing laser work on control panels and decided to bring the engraving in house. An example of one of the panels below. I've cut and engraved 1/4" acrylic and 1/4" plywood just for test purposes. Other than that its supposed to engrave anodized aluminum and mark on other metals using a metal marking solution and engrave/cut a lot of other non-metal materials. It doesn't cut metal. Shoot me PM if you need something.


We were looking at these guys: www.lasermarktech.com
Turned out the (for us) affordable systems weren't up to deep marking on bare copper which is 99% of what we needed. I believe other materials are easier. This fellow is very helpful and responsive:
Tom Tindale
Sales Engineer
[email protected]
Probably not be suitable for deep marking for your application and I've never done it but I think you can mask metal with a "paint", laser engrave off the paint, and then chemical etch the material.

IMG_0117 - Copy.JPG
 
Gentleman, thank you all for your responses. It took so long for anyone to respond, I had completely forgotten about this post. We have yet to purchase one as we were having problems figuring out how to handle ventilation for the system. Hopefully we have solved that problem.
 








 
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