CO2 Laser Cutter

My Lightobject 18mm laser head for K40 did not come with a mounting plate. However it does come with an air assist nozzle. The K40 laser head parts are as shown below. Fortunately Bart dimensioned the mounting plate on his drawing for the lens/mirror assembly (b28018). I drew this out on a piece of paper…

I have always intended to make my own mirrors for this laser cutter following the example of Tim Wehr on his Blog. To my knowledge I have never thrown out a hard disk from any of my many computer builds over the years, as such I have quite a stock to make use of. I…

The wiring continues, Z max, min and door microswitches were soldered up. I wanted to have some internal lighting in the laser cutting area. I had some white 12V LED light strips, that I had bought some time back for some of my RC models, from Hobby King for £2.49. I cut the 1m strip…

The ammeter is wired in series with the negative for the laser PSU. For the motor wiring, I am using 6 core alarm flex from Wickes, but I pull out 2 of the cores first, I use these elsewhere for limit switches and other low voltage wiring. I have 3 different sets of connectors on…

For the wiring, I started with the 240V and 24V power wires. You can see from the below photo that I have a few colours to choose from, most of these spools are left over from when I rewired my Beach Buggy, the vertically stacked ones are from wiring up the lights in the garage.…

For the top right panel, I marked out all of the required openings and then cut the two square ones with a knife and the round one with a hole saw before drilling any required mounting holes. The Arduino screen will have a cover/surround that will hide the mounting screws. I am not entirely sure…

I decided it was about time I did some more work on the skins for the laser cutter. The supplier of the Dibond only cut the skins to size, they did not cut out any of the details. The most involved piece is probably the front panel, this is the design as provided with the…

I have slowly been acquiring additional parts for the laser cutter, some via eBay from China, some during holidays in the USA. Adafruit 1947 – 2.8″ TFT Touchscreen shield for Arduino $44.95 Adafruit 196 – Proto-Screwshield (Wingshield) R3 for Arduino $14.95 both these items came direct from Adafruit whilst I was in the USA on holiday and incurred…

Another area I have been working on is the wiring diagram for the laser cutter. This I have been drawing up in Microsoft Visio. Since I have a Mac, and there is no version of Visio for Mac, I make use of a Windows 10 virtual machine that I run under VirtualBox. I obtained genuine…

I have recently been updating my Sketchup model and printed out a few more of pieces. First up was a mount for the air solenoid and water inlet/outlet barbs here with the various items attached, ready to be installed in the frame. Next I decided I wanted to make use of a sheet of copper clad PCB…