I’m on the fence about adding a 24 watt J Tech laser to my Onefinity Elite or purchasing a stand alone unit. I’m interested in hearing the pros and cons.
Pros- I can utilize the entire 48X48 bed and with tiling even bigger.
Allows me more detail and saves on waste when cutting small stock
Cons- Portability, a J-Tech means my machine is fixed.
I guess it depends on what I will be using it for. I made this Grinch Wreath and would have like to cut this out in layers making it easier to paint.
I guess I’m interested in hearing what you all have to say but, recognize my use will likely dictate the path I take.
I’d say that depends on your intended applications for the laser and how frequently you want to use it. I have the 14W JTech on my Elite Foreman.
I’ve found that I have to go very slowly to engrave or it looks pretty bad. For example, aluminum and stainless business cards I made took 25 or 30 minutes per side. Etching a detailed photo on 12x12" plywood would take me 3-6 hours. It could be related to the laser mount, my airline not being permanently secured, or the heavy spindle causing jerky acceleration thats not noticible when carving.
If I intended to use the laser as anything other than a toy, I’d get a standalone unit.
I have a 5watt Chinese open frame led laser that will do 24x30, but the LED lasers are so slow it’s not really useful for things that size, because it takes so long & needs to be connected to a laptop to run. Business card size is reasonable, and instead of a branding iron I’m hoping to make it smaller and set it up for vertical clamping to engrave my logo on the edge of cutting boards. I’m not looking to cut parts out.
I’d I want detail for painting I’ll use a 30° engraving bit to outline for separation or mask off/carve /paint, like for wedding signs.
Though I still want to make my own branding iron too…
What strange is if you look at the review of all the laser’s J-tech makes the 24W seems to be the best compromise for speed and accuracy. If cutting was all i wanted to do the 44W would work but, it’s very expensive. Even the 24W is a lot. I may save for a standalone unit.
Not quite. I can engrave at over 100 in/min. It looks terrible, though. I have to slow down to under 30 to get high quality results.
That’d be the case for any laser I put on my machine. Probably is due to a combination of using a QCW stand, using a poor laser mount, and the inertia from a heavy spindle changing direction causing them to shake.
Photo engraving with any non galvo laser is very slow at decent resolution. Thats just the name of the game.
The large envelope offered by the jtech modules makes them very useful for large projects or batch jobs.
Portability is a very useful feature the jtech lacks. Being able to sign a workpiece that wont fit under the gantry or on site is nice. Fortunately, for simple engraving, you need very little power and those lasers are dirt cheap. You can get a 5w or 10w chinese laser for a couple hundred bucks to solve your portability issues. If you can afford a jtech you can also afford an older laser master unit for next to nothing for those niche jobs.
The jtech is indeed slow. Well, more accurately, the onefinity for laser work is slow. Acceleration is not where smaller machines can be due to the massively larger weight of the assembly. I have the 44 with an additional 7 watt module (now that that is an option it is more flexible than the 24, and the 7w module was pretty cheap and offers more detail than the 24 or 14). Thats just the name of the game. If you’re planning to do a lot of photo engraving with any gantry laser you’re in for some waiting. Its just a slow process.
Vector based engraving or similar is not as fast as a dedicated laser unit with a lighter carriage, but its not so slow as to be a major irritation. Adjusting line spacing and hatching goes a very long way towards dialing in speeds.
For me, the ability to use the full envelope is important. That should be the major guiding decision for your choice- will you feasibly ever use that sort of functionality on large pieces. It is a very handy thing for large wall art and signs. Tiling is not the easiest thing to do seamlessly with a laser, and also because zeroing of a laser is not so easily perfectly repeatable as it is with your probe block.
Economically the jtech units are high priced, maybe even overpriced. But they do work well and i trust they will last a lot longer than overdriven Chinese units. I have personally found that laser engraving as a value based proposition is one of the more profitable jobs I’ve ever done. At the same time, simple signatures and name engravings don’t need a high tech or enormous laser. I do like my jtechs quite a bit personally and i like being able to do milling and lasering jobs together with relatively little interruption to the workflow.
Certainly. Just make sure if you’re looking to buy a pricy laser you’re getting the right kind. You want to do lots of cutting, a dedicated CO2 is likely your huckleberry. You want to do signatures, detailed engravings, maybe maps or signs? A large format diode like the jtech on a onefinity offers may be just right. You want to do lightly engraved photos or business cards? You really need a galvo laser to do those with any speed- or you can just use a diamond drag bit for a much lower cost alternative on your onefinity.
I have had the 24W and found it to be a capable unit but I wouldn’t want to cut solid stock more than 3/8" thick with regularity and wouldn’t want to cut any ply thicker than 1/2" regularly. The 44 is a bit more capable in that regard but can’t do detail shading well at all.
If you do get a laser diode for your onefinity I recommend you turn your acceleration way up. There are a few foibles to using the onefinity as a lasering machine, but so long as you’re not asking something unreasonable of it, it’s quite capable.
I’m really looking to cut 1/4 - 3/8 plywood. 1/2 maybe. Will the 24w do it in a single pass? Everything I have read says yes, 10-15imp. I would like to engrave on a cutting board too.
The size of my cuts are around 30 inches so that’s why I’m leaning towards the J Tech
1/4 maybe, but its going to have some charred bits holding it together depending on the brand and quality of ply. The more layers and glue, the less likely. Ply is a bit harder to cut than similar solid wood due to the glue. “Laserply” is a brand of plywood better used for lasering if you can find it.
If i recall for 3/8 material in hardwood i needed 3 passes and I typically ran at 12 ipm when i had a 24. The species of wood will make a substanial difference as well.
1/2 inch in one pass no way. The 44 requires multiple passes at that thickness and needs to be babysat as flareups can occur. To be honest laser cutting wood that thick really should be discouraged or maybe attempted with a much more powerful laser. Scorching and fires are very possible and you will need to watch it like a hawk when trying to do parts that thick.
Looking back at old projects i have saved this jigsaw puzzle was done on 1/4 inch BB ply, pretty good quality stuff. I did two passes with the 24 at 12 ipm.
Side note the actual engraving was also done with the 24. It did a passable but not incredible job. Another side note, monochromatic puzzles are an excellent way to torture people.
ANOTHER side note… for cutting you will need something like a honeycomb bed to prevent damage or fires and also prevent scorching your part as you cut it out. No matter what laser system you go with you will need something like that, but it means for cutting your envelope will realistically be much smaller than the size of your onefinity. For engraving it is not very important.
It felt wasteful spending money on a separate laser, where half the money was buying the precise X-Y positioning that my 1F already did well (& it was already sitting next to a 3D printer that was doing basically all the same stuff too). But there’s enough of a premium on the JTech & other 1F laser solutions that you don’t realize any cost savings, and there are enough specializations in the supporting equipment (steel honeycomb vs MDF wasteboard, work holding, rotary, &c), that you end up with something much more capable and convenient if you get standalone. I would only consider a 1F-mounted laser if I needed the size (my current laser cant match my 1Fs reach, or tile in more than 1 dimension), or maybe if I needed very precise alignment with CNC operation (and even there I’d probably try to cook up a workholding/probing solution).
