Laser Cutter Background and Build Reasoning
A lot of people ask why I built the laser cutter. They ask why I spent so much time, energy, and money to design and build something that I could have bought on Amazon with one week shipping. I want to address what kickstarted this whole Laser Cutter build, but the short, 2 sentence answer is….
I knew designing and building it would teach me more than reading assembly instructions while also allowing me to build it to perfectly suit my wants. The second, arguably more importantly reason - I knew I could do it, so why not.
For background, I was a TA in the BIDC (Bechtel Innovation Design Center) at Purdue all 4 years of my undergrad. Having unparalleled access to any machine shop equipment you could imagine was a gamechanger, and the skills learnt and friends made will stick with me long into the future. The shop encouraged all TA’s to learn the machines and increase comfort and proficiency whenever possible. A “work perk” to support us was that we had access to the machines for personal projects outside of regular machine shop hours, during the weekend, and even during a shift under the conditions that we never worked alone and that there were no student projects to take priority. Over the years, I grew to love and better appreciate the insane flexibility I had by having 5-axis CNC mills, live-tooling equipped lathes, welding equipment, paint booths, hand / power tools, a water jet, a laser cutter, a battery of 3d printers, and a full stock room of excess material all at my disposal.
Of all the tools the shop had to offer, I grew fondest of the laser cutter and lathes. The laser cutter, a Trotec Speedy 400 Flexx, quickly became my go-to for making trinkets, prototypes, class-project structures, and supporting my RC hobby obsession. It reduced a multi-day, hand-cramping foamboard cutting process to a 15 minute operation yielding sharper edges and smoother curves. For simple plates and box construction, it cut down an 8 hour 3D print to a 5 minute task using off the shelf Baltic Birch plywood. By changing designs slightly and breaking geometry up into simple intersecting 2D parts instead of a single, complex 3D part, it reduced the dreaded down-time between idea conception and holding that first prototype.
Graduating, moving to New Orleans, and losing access to the shop and all its wonders meant I had to adjust my prototyping process to more accurately reflect my far more modest tooling. I have a 3d printer that served me well during senior design, but aside from my adorably small cart of power tools and saws, I had no means of subtractive manufacturing, and certainly none that were as precise or as fast as the systems I worked with. That, combined with the pain of remembering how tedious it was to cut out my foamboard airplanes before planted the idea of “simply” building my own laser cutter. I saw it as a win-win; I would be expanding my home shop capabilities, and the process of designing and building it was sure to be educational for a multitude of reasons.
Thus began the painstaking process of toying with the idea. I knew it was a big project to bite into, especially given my limited tooling and space available. That didn’t stop the laser cutter from developing in my head, the occasional sketch here or there as I toyed with subsystem designs, or casually perusing AliExpress and Amazon for oddly specific hardware…
The idea had taken hold and I committed. Long story short, given my day job and international production shortages thanks to Covid, it was 5 months of design and contemplation, then 2 months of build. To date, it is the most rewarding project I have built and I regret absolutely nothing that led to me now sharing living space with a machine the size of a dining table needing two separate circuits to satisfy its power draw.
How it morphed into the beast it now is remains a story for another time….
