The Laser Thread

J. Hoffman said:
I'm getting to the point where I need more etching stencils and I'm considering a fiber laser instead. I see some machines appear to be one piece and others appear to be two piece. Is there an advantage/disadvantage to either? Assuming both are 60 Watt.
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I have 60W MOPA Haotian in two pieces. With the two piece unit, they are connected by a permanent fiberoptic cable. It is not a plugin cable. It makes moving, setup more challenging as you also don't want to bend it very much as it is fiberoptic cable. A single unit is naturally heavier by itself, vs separating the weight into two parts.

For those take their laser on the road to craftshows, doing stuff live onsite, a one piece makes more sense.

I think an advantage of the two pieces is range of how high you an set the lens. This probably isn't a big deal for knives and the typical lens you'd be working with like a 100 or 200. But if you stick a rotary on there for tumblers that make the work taller, then a big lens, you might be running out of vertical space on the tower.
 
ashwinearl said:
I have 60W MOPA Haotian in two pieces. With the two piece unit, they are connected by a permanent fiberoptic cable. It is not a plugin cable. It makes moving, setup more challenging as you also don't want to bend it very much as it is fiberoptic cable. A single unit is naturally heavier by itself, vs separating the weight into two parts.

For those take their laser on the road to craftshows, doing stuff live onsite, a one piece makes more sense.

I think an advantage of the two pieces is range of how high you an set the lens. This probably isn't a big deal for knives and the typical lens you'd be working with like a 100 or 200. But if you stick a rotary on there for tumblers that make the work taller, then a big lens, you might be running out of vertical space on the tower.
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That's the exact laser I'm looking at. Do you like it?
 
Got my mega enclosure set up finally and moved the laser and CNC to the garage! Now the fun really begins!
PXL_20251023_000927894.jpg
 
J. Hoffman said:


Neither of the ones I'm looking at are enclosed. Both have the same work area and power, just set up differently. I'm not sure if there are advantages I'm not seeing.
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I bought one of the integrated Monport lasers similar to the one pictured. The price difference to get a two piece was just way more than I wanted to spend at the time. So far, I haven't really noticed any issues, though I did custom drill and tap a couple of holes closer to the edge of my base plate so that I could get a little more clearance for my rotary. I also milled some different slots in the base of my rotary so it could hang off the side a little more, and make it easier to center larger tumblers and such. I suppose it might make as much sense to get a larger auxiliary plate that I could mount to the existing base, but this was the cheaper way for me to do it.
I will add that I opted to buy a rotary off of eBay instead of through Monport and just wire my own aviation connector to it. I don't remember what I paid, but I wanna say it ended up being less than half the cost of what Monport wanted for basically the same rotary. As far as the price of the laser (which I bought during a sale), they were very competitive, especially when bundling Lightburn with my laser for an additional discount.
 
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