Okay, we got hand tools, we got power tools we got
CNC machines, but apparently that's not enough. Now us woodworkers need to
learn about lasers also! This is the NEJE master 2s
plus with a 30 watt laser. I know nothing about lasers … yet. We'll see how hard this is to learn. We got
an unboxing and over the next couple of days I will try it out and we'll take you along.
First the standard disclaimer: NO, i'm not being paid to make the video but yes NEJE did send
me the laser for free, but also NO they don't have any editorial control over the video.
They just sent it to me to try out.
So this is how it comes. Yes, it's a Chinese
company, but they do have a warehouse in the USA. So, it came domestically.
I've got the laser here, and then this is the MF6 air assist kit, which comes on the
side (a separate item). I've watched a few videos and apparently having an air source
close to the laser will help with burns. We've got a little instruction
manual that I'll need to review. Everything is solidly packed in foam. For a DIY
kit it's fascinating how few parts there are. Here's everything unboxed; You have the laser, you
have one part of the gantry, you have another part of the gantry. So all the wheels and the belts,
(and) the motors — they are all already mounted. Here's the USB interface. You have a set of
protective glasses. You have a power cord, and then you have a little pack of tools. There's
a USB cord and some sample materials and that's it. 1,2,3,4,5,6 items … again this this was
the air assist kit which is a separate kit, and the instructions.
So, six items that's it.
So i need to now review the manual and let's get this put together.
So for step one we take this assembly and we put it to this assembly and
the cable is notched so it'll only go one way. They do give you a little wrench but
just go get your own 8mm wrench and that'll probably be much happier in your hands.
And step two is to take the laser module and install it in the carriage. This
one has this little slide here which goes in and the manual says put it
about 30mm so that's about the right amount. Then they give you an Allen (Hex) key to tighten
this clamp.
Then we take the cable and plug it in. And so that's the basic machine assembled.
When I first saw it I was kind of puzzled because I'm used to a CNC where there's two
rails and this it just has the one rail … but it's it's not doing routering or whatever
that a CNC does, it's just moving the laser around so I can understand it doesn't need to
have quite as much support around the edges.
This is interesting to me for portability
because that way you can put it away. Down here at the one end there's a usb
port for plugging in your data cable, there's a power connector for plugging in your ac
adapter and what i'm guessing is a reset button. Tucked in behind here is the
controlling board which i'm guessing is the brains of the whole operation.
They do also supply some L-brackets and they suggest that you attach this to a table because
it will shake when it moves back and forth. So, you probably want to get like a two
foot by two foot sheet of plywood and bolt (the unit) down to that.
I'll probably do something like that and then begin testing.
… So, it's been a couple of weeks since
that last bit that I recorded and I've been playing around with this machine on
and off during that time and the first thing that you're going to notice is that
I have not yet built a base for this unit. And maybe some of that's laziness but I also
like that this is nice and light so I could just move it to the workpiece if I want
to and I can put it away for storage… I also realized that my workbench is
two feet wide and that means I can just get a clamp here on either end.
I do have to be careful that I don't interfere with the carriage where
I put the clamp.
Especially at this end, the carriage goes right up to the end.
So, i've been finding that that's good enough for my practicing.
In the future i might still make a base for it. First thing I've learned is: I hate these glasses. Now, you need to use safety
glasses because it's a laser! You don't want to damage your vision.
But, you'll notice that I wear glasses and that means these need to fit over
my glasses, and I find that there's reflection in between (the glasses).
You've got to do it, but it's annoying. So like all the other inexpensive low-end
engravers on the market, there's no enclosure. That's one of the reasons why you need glasses.
Generally, I don't mind that because it means it's cheap.
But also, it's it's light and portable. I can move this to the work piece or I can move it around
in my shop. I can also put it away for storage. That also means there's no built-in ventilation. When i'm doing a heavy cutting session, I
have this exhaust fan going in my window, and I also have a small little fan that
I built that is blowing across the unit. Even with that exhaust fan and with this
other fan, if I'm doing a lot of engraving, I'll start to get a haze in the room.
I probably should not be doing this in a basement but it's cold in my garage.
Just bear
that in mind if you get one of these units: You're responsible for your ventilation, and you probably
should use it in in a well ventilated shop. So in the past two weeks I've tried out two
different kinds of laser control software first the the NEJE system comes with
its own NEJE engraving software. It appears to be fairly basic software at first.
You have a canvas, which represents your engraving area.
But what's really good for beginners is it has a tutorial section.
It has here a photo gallery where it has a whole bunch of built-in stock images. These are all just basically JPEGs or pictures… that sort of thing that you can try using.
What's also interesting is it has an online g-code section and this is vector
graphics. There's line drawings. So for example this ladybug … I pull that into
the canvas and you can adjust the size of it. You really only have two controls: you have
a slider which controls the laser power from all the way up to 100% and down to 0%.
Though I'm told that i think 20% is about the minimum that actually does something.
Then you
have another slider here which is … they label it burning time but that's basically how fast the
gantry is going to go. And it will put a warning there if it's like you're going too fast and I've
seen some people critique this that it's really basic but for a beginner that might be just fine.
So if we look over here at this board this is where I've been doing a lot of sample burning and
I would make notes as to speeds and … here I'm saying this is the NEJE software and here I had
the burning set way too light and then here is one where I bumped the machine part way
so the writing didn't work out.
Um… here this is the NEJE software.
I loaded in a picture of me and it's not great but it's legible and
considering that I really didn't know what I was doing. I just loaded it in and poked around at
the menu items … I thought that was pretty good. Here, for instance, is one where I had the
speed too slow or the or the laser too high and I just aborted it. I'm not even sure what
it was going to be … Again here you know from Tom and Jerry … I aborted the image because it
was just burning in too deeply for what i wanted. Here's one of my more later
attempts.
This is one of the samples again from the NEJE software.
Here I wrote down it was going at a two millisecond speed 51% on the laser and it
produced a nice crisp image of an airplane. Here's that ladybug I was showing you.
This is on cherry … Again same settings then NEJE software 51 with two millisecond
speed a real nice simple clean engraving. So in terms of other software I've been
using Lightburn there's another one out there called LaserGRBL which I haven't tried
yet. Lightburn is a huge complicated package. I'm really only beginning to scratch the surface
of it. So no surprise my practices all usually involve versions of my logo. That's what I've been
practicing and trying…. Here,this one is really burned in quite deep it's quite nice and again you
got to make notes as to what your settings are. Here's one on cherry turned out quite well and
here's some practices on plywood.
You know that one was way too light and then here I was showing
how … making note of how here I just had to change the focus and I got a different result.
Getting the focus right is really important. There's a focus knob here on the side that you
can use to adjust the laser and it'll go from a line down to a point. And you really
want to get it down to a point. So let's close this out with a little show
and tell. One of the things that I've been practicing over the last few years is paddle
making.
This is a little one that I made for my son when he was much younger, so it's
kind of our spare paddle right now and one of the things that I did here is I
engraved my logo. This was an already finished piece — it wasn't bare wood — but the
laser went through the finish no problem. This is a big item so here it's really nice that the
laser doesn't have an enclosure because I could fit the paddle in. It tapers down so I put a
little wedge under it and then I had this board clamp there to make sure this wasn't moving and
at this end I had the piece clamped and it's a bit tricky because with a freeform object like
this it's a little bit a little bit tricky to make sure you're in a straight line so you
know where it's going to do its engraving. I'll admit that I'm a little off center but
the results turned out really well.
Then later on on the other side I put my logo up here
and I rotated it 90 degrees and I added my my name and it's sort of a serial number here —
it's a little hard to read: 2012-6. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I look forward
to doing things like this with other projects. Again, being a portable unit I could either bring
the project to the laser, or bring the laser to the project, or maybe engrave a piece while
you're constructing it so that it's smaller. So finally i have this off cut from another
project that I turned into a coaster that I keep on my desk. I wanted to engrave a
picture on it and on the NEJE website they talk about using Inkscape — which is a free line
drawing program.
(I guess you could also use one of the Adobe products if you want to.)
So I found a picture of a canoe on a lake that i wanted to engrave, and I took that
picture and converted it to grayscale. And then I imported it into Inkscape and then
I just drew on top of the image with bezier curves. It's pretty easy to just draw a line and
then push and pull it into a curve that you want. This went fairly quickly, depending on the amount
of detail that you want to put into the picture, and when it's finished I simply deleted the
original photo. And I'm left with all my line drawing. I can then export this as a dxf type
file which I can import into Lightburn for the engraving on the laser. The NEJE
software supports this also, but it needs a specific export filter for
Inkscape which you can get on their website. Okay, let me stop there for a moment.
I was
reviewing the footage, and I think I went through the explanation about Inkscape just a little bit
too quickly. So, over here on the left in the list of tools, you have this one tool which says
"draw bezier curves and straight lines". That's this little icon here, and then up here I have
this other little icon which is "edit paths by node". Those are the only two tool things
that I'm talking about. So, when you click on "draw bezier curves" and then you just go point-and-click.
Everywhere you click you're dropping a line segment, and then you double-click
at the end and there's your line segment. Then you go up to this other one, the
"edit path by node", and I select that tool and then you can come down and you can select a
segment of the line, and then you can just grab it you can push it into any sort of a curve
that you like.
If you don't like that curve, you can push it the other way. And then you see
it's putting out these little helper things; You can also grab those and start twisting it
around. Then you go to the next one and you select that line segment and you do the same thing.
So, that's all I was doing: I was drawing a line and then I was using the edit paths tool to bend
the line into a curve. And then I deleted the underlying photo when I was done.
Here goes our practice run. My test run worked out.
I like the positioning
and so I just want to do the final run her. I'm just going to lay this on top.
I did first have to reset the height of the laser module, and then adjust it's focus,
because this work piece was at a different height. Over on my computer where I have the
pattern I'm going to use the frame option which tells the laser to draw a
square around where it's going to burn. This is just one last double check that everything
is right in the position where I want it to be. By the way, YES, this is the actual
speed of the laser when it's at work.
There we go. I didn't show it on camera,
but I actually ran that (session) twice. I didn't touch it at all, so the piece
didn't move but I didn't really like the intensity of the initial (engraving) so
I slowed it down a bit in in the software, and I just ran it a second time,
and the results turned out great. Okay, guys, I think that's about as far as
I was gonna take this one. This is just me, who's an experienced woodworker but an absolute
newbie when it comes to lasers, trying it out, getting some experience, getting some inspiration.
and yeah I certainly had that! I had a lot of fun; I got to learn some new things. There's
a bit of a steep learning curve, but once you sort of start to get over
the hump, you can you can build on it. I made some fun engravings.
I haven't even
scratched the surface: I haven't done any cutting, I haven't done really much with photos — that
could be something that could come in future. This unit is about $259 right now (November
2021). There are cheaper units, there are more expensive units. It's really not that
expensive to get into trying these things out. Links to everything that I talked about
are down in the video description. And i think that's it so
we'll see you on the next one!.