Help Kamloops Makerspace choose a laser cutter

We at Kamloops Makerspace are ready to purchase a laser cutter. We have saved up around $5000 to put toward this purchase and we have the space for it. I know that you have had a laser for a long time, so I was hoping to get some advice about our purchase.

We would like to have something that is

  • 40" or wider, preferably 48” (~1200mm) wide cutting area
  • 100 watt CO2 laser
  • USB drive input and a usable software stack, preferably accepting a wide range of input formats

Option 1:
Get some sort of sponsorship or find a used one from a north american company, such as:

  • Trotec Their speedy 500 or even speedy 400 look pretty awesome.
  • Epilog
  • ULS

These machines are an order of magnitude more expensive than what we can afford. But if we find a used one or get some sort of sponsorship from the company in exchange for demoing, perhaps it would be feasible. I think this is a shot in the dark though, and we most likely will end up going with option 2.

Option 2:
Purchase one from China

  • KING Rabbit laser a friend of ours in Calgary has one of their machines and recommended them
  • CNC Cheap this seller has 100% positive feedback on ebay and has been around for a few years, but there is only a few laser related feedback in his history.

Are there any other sources I that you would recommend? What other specs should we pay attention to? Any advice would be appreciated!

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Consider Full Spectrum as well, MakerLabs has a bunch of those now, I
believe.

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Also I think most of the cutters require a computer to be hooked up to
them, so USB drive input shouldn’t be a problem. Similar to how ours works,
if you’ve ever seen it.

If a computer is an issue, we have a pile of them. I don’t know what’s
going on with the towers we have in our shelving, but there’s a stack of
laptops some people have been talking about getting rid of. I’m sure we can
find one that will be perfectly adequate, cover it in VHS stickers, and
then send it out there :wink:

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Jarrett Rainier jrainier@gmail.com
wrote:

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CNC Cheap is the eBay ID of Red Sail Laser - and is exactly where we bought our laser from. :smile:

It’s been a long time obviously since we bought the laser from them, but the process at the time went great. It was definitely effort to import something as significant as a laser cutter, but nothing different than any other commercial importing.

The only significant thing we’ve changed is to replace the original controller board/PC software that it came with - we upgraded to a AWC608 from LightObject in the US due to the original control board dying. AFAIK Red Sail has long since changed to a new control board, so that experience is likely no longer applicable.

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