Acctek AKJ1390 Chinese Laser Full Review - The Woodshop Life

hello and welcome back to the woodshop life this is a follow up to the laser when a little bit of a walk around walk through this is a sort of two week follow-up to having it delivered you can see on our channel the other videos I've got of it which are installing the fume extraction adding solenoid and some other videos if you're interested in seeing more click on channel name and you'll find them in our other videos this is from AK Tech and I'm owned for lasers before Chinese lasers that is from various other brands which I've always not been super excited about in addition to the four Chinese lasers I've owned I also have extensive experience with epilogues and TRO techs I've used the TRO Tech's speedy 300s and 400s as well as their fiber flex series up to five hundred the speedy 500 sighs the epilogue helix and the mid-sized one legend that's the one the epilogue legend so I've done a quite a bit of work with lasers this is custom-built to my specifications I have specified every last detail of these from the rails to the laser tubes and power supplies so this is a custom build so it is more expensive than just buying one off eBay but if something I would highly recommend you look at doing is going straight to the manufacturer in China and getting what you need not just buying something off Amazon eBay which is just maybe a couple hundred dollars couple hundred pounds cheaper but is essentially rubbish compared to this I'm really happy with this one I think this has got some exceptional additions to it and I'm gonna take you through those firstly one of our options which I had on this is the honeycomb bed it's much cheaper to buy the honeycomb with the laser them to buy it after the fact because these are the good ones are big rigid honeycomb not the expanded aluminium version he's a steel folded steel inside here you know metal frame I have three honeycomb beds because you're going to get them dirty got one for wood one for acrylic and one for clean stuff so wood is gonna leave a lot of residue of the resin acrylic is gonna leave a lot of residual acrylic and I've actually seen honeycombs completely packed full of acrylic resin just fine if you're just cutting acrylic but if you then go and cut something else it gets really messy these are quite heavy so you really can't get these ship to the course economically after the fact so underneath the honeycomb bed we have a knife bed I ordered extra knife slats with mine just five extra because the ends of these sometimes look like they've been cut with a butter knife these ones from AK Tech are pretty good so I'm pretty pleased with these what I will end up doing though is shaving just a little bit off the top of each one so the honeycomb will sit over them with its lip and that will get honeycomb nice and flat one thing I'm really excited about on this laser compared to other lasers I've owned is the setup of this under the Neath the table it's one of the table is this whole enclosure essentially which has a parts tray in the middle this is particularly exciting to me because on my previous 1290 size lasers I've found that they were just they were just open on the bottom they didn't have a structure for the bed this is a very solid structure all around here is welded three millimeter steel it's not just cheap aluminium extrusion you cheap eBay and Aliexpress and Amazon units just have cheap aluminum extrusion which these knives sit on this is a fully welded folded steel table and further to that like I say it's got this shape quote enclosure so if you're cutting small parts they all end up down in that middle path that small box in the centre of the enclosure is actually a draw and that leads me to something else all of the catchers on these panels nice quality they're all magnetic lock into place they're much better than the other ones I've had on previous lasers [Music] so this is a draw which pulls out as you can see it's caught all the small parts and when Tarin's been cutting a lot of pieces in here all the small parts are just landing through falling down into the drawer and all she needs to do a collectible or small pass just pull that drawer out take it away and collect them all easier then trying to vacuum all the small parts out from the bottom of the bed or trying to find that small part that fell through because you weren't using honeycomb so I'm super impressed by this bed structure it is so much more rigid than any other Chinese laser I've seen another thing I really like about this laser is underneath this bed we have a fume extraction port that's capturing all the smoke which is coming out from the bottom of the cut and it captures a lot of that you can see by the discoloration of the event that it's capturing a lot of smoke on there you also have a separate connection to the port back here which covers the overdraft so there's a gap at the front of the laser air flows over the top some goes down to the bottom port some goes over the top and that just helps clear the surface of any smoke especially when you're engraving I don't think I'm not thrilled with is that the laser is using inductive proxies on just very cheap sheet metal bent pieces for homing inductive proxies are accurate to about 0.4 mil of a millimeter or so for the very best panasonic ones so not ideal micro switches are much more accurate and repeatable so another thing I've done with this laser is I've put a red dot beam in the back by the laser beam with a beam combined so you can see it bouncing off the second mirror there and coming off a beam combiner in the back there that's a feature which typically you won't see on a Chinese laser but it only cost $50 to add so what it means is once I have that collimated with the beam as I mostly do now you can see exactly on your workpiece where the laser beam is going to hit instead of having a little laser pointer stuck on the side pointing down at an angle which depending on where the said height is is going to vary the position or if you bump it it's going to vary the position the laser beam lies exactly where the red dot beam goes through because it's following the same optical path so continuing on top I have gone with the Rueda RDC 633 2g controller specifically for this keypad the cheaper reader controller 320 C has just a graphics LCD which is just basically dot matrix it can't show you the cut it can show you details on there and then the next model up has basic football 2g has basically the same structure is just but no keypad I paid extra to get the keypad because I can go in here and say speed is going to be 100 millimeters per second hit enter and move and that's really good if you're trying to position say accurately I can jump back and go speed 20 millimeters a second and then move the laser very slowly it also allows me to much more easily slow faster than USB do network configuration all the stuff you can do through laser work other than setting up the job itself can be done through this control panel coming around to the side of the machine we have a main and a breaker here which is a proper breaker so if the Machine goes with nuts it's gonna break they're the four hits your main circuit board breakers on your power supply we've got if the net broken down and we've got USB personally I prefer these on the back of the machine but they are what they are we have everything in here is labeled which i think is really nice they've put label printer printouts on everything describing what it is which is really convenient and one thing which they've gone overboard on which most Chinese lasers they they don't do it all is they've gone and poor labels on every single wire so you know what every wire is if you need to do any maintenance or changes you can immediately see what they are which is fantastic a lot of Chinese lasers I've seen don't even put Farrell's on here for next to a couple of hundred pounds in buying this laser I've gone with a good quality manufacturer we've got Farrell's everything's crimped everything's done properly it's not a big deal to have just wires jammed in there but if you have wires just jammed in there they can with vibration work-hardened and break off quite easily which is not going to help your machine we also have a filter on the input line so this is going to stop any noise from messing up the machine from other industrial equipment you might have and it's also going to stop this from messing with other electronics on your same circuit another nice thing about this electronics cabinet compared to a couple of other lasers I've owned is that this is completely isolated there's just a couple of holes down the bottom here for cables to go through or for welds in the enclosure to go through other than that this is completely sealed off from the rest of the laser so you're not gonna get laser smoking here and laser smoke does not mix with electronics very well it's kind of corrosive and he's not gonna do your electronics much good so this is to me as an electronics engineer superb coming around to the back of machine it is a bit darker so there's some good things bad things here firstly I live in the UK this came wired up with a European plug so if someone hasn't looked at where this is actually going and figured out the right plug for it secondly the earth wasn't connected to the power plug it was only on the chassis earth here so I've connected that up internally which is if you're not an electrician or experienced with electronics you may not comfortable with that but it should be done to your power earth rather than relying and you hooking this up to an earth post somewhere stuck into the ground the other thing is this is the water cooler alarm and the cable on this is unbelievably short when combined with the cables the hoses going to the laser tube it doesn't really give you a lot of options as to where to place the cooler it has to be dead central middle machine not ideal I would like to extend this at some point I'll do that but we get to another couple of things I really like this is the laser power supply access hatch other lasers I've owned and Chinese places I've seen have just had the laser power supply sitting around in the bottom of Laser enclosure where they're exposed to all the fumes and everything and these things run at 20,000 volts plus is 18,000 volts when the machines running twenty-four to thirty thousand volts to strike the arc you don't really want that I've specified specifically the recce power supply the P 18 as far as I'm aware there are no clones of this on the market normally you get the J nd my power supplies which are so cheap and they are terrible this will take anywhere from 80 to 250 volts in and is much more solidly built you mean look at the size of this thing compared to the cheap Chinese ones are about half the size of this for the same wattage these are really well built and they've handled a lot of crap whereas before I've had power suppliers that have just blown randomly all the time I went through three Chinese cheap Chinese power supplies before I went just to exclusively directly power supplies you also have a beautiful reader here which is upside down moment but it shows my input voltage 234 volts stern 35 volts AC in input control voltage output amperage so no little dinky analog gauge it's showing you what the power supply thinks it's outputting at all times you're outputting at all times which means you can get this thing set so that a hundred percent power on your laser controller is a hundred percent power on your laser tube which is important because if your laser tube if we set too high in voltage you will end its life early you can also see things like ambient temperature and in humidity and the amount of hours of work time that this laser has had and then it goes on to some stuff about the fact that recce is the most amazing manufacture of glass tubes and charge so we also have our laser fan now this is our port for getting the hose in as I've mentioned in the laser venting video this is really nicely done it's not attached to the laser directly it goes in and directly to the two ports we have this nice little access hatch to our hoses internally which is really well-thought-out you want to see more about that have a look at my other videos I specified the 750 watt blower fan rather than a 550 watt which is standard it's not that much of a difference but these bigger ones are certainly a lot more robust than the plastic bouncy castle fans I've seen on eBay units either units if you're lucky come with a very plastic fantastic fan which burns itself out in no time awful these ones are a bit more robust it cost me barely anything more like twenty dollars I think to go from the 550 up to the 750 one I mean it's a no-brainer really it's when you're spending this much money on a machine why wouldn't you get a slightly better bit of extraction so speaking of the chiller it's getting kind of dark back here so we go further back this is the CW 5200 industrial chiller which I also paid extra for the CW 5000 Schiller is not a great option they've used multiple different types of metal on the coolant loop and actually creates a slight battery effect which will corrode the metal I've had a CW 5000 caller fail before because of this it's all over the internet you can read about it 5200 doesn't have this problem I actually bought two of these chillers one for the CNC router and one for the laser these are really nice that are refrigerated they're not just relying on a radiator to cool the tube with the troopers power flies I have you must have a refrigerated chiller but even on the my 40 watts 50 what 60 watt tubes I'd still recommend a refrigerated chiller it makes a huge difference when your laser tube is running at a consistent temperature the power output is nice and even and the lifespan is greatly enhanced up top we've got just an old laptop which I'm using to run the laser software it sits on top I don't care if it's in here all the time just sitting on there it's about ten years old now so it is what it is pretty standard cover for the laser tube again everything has these really nice latches which I love so much let's have a look at the tube inside so this is the meet of the laser engraver this is the laser tube itself they're big they're expensive I bought a spare one because they cost more than their actual value to ship in the future than they do to buy with the laser I am not thinking of it as a replacement for this one when this one blows these are rekky this is our genuine recce tube which is rated ten thousand hours I'm probably going to replace this laser with probably a Trotec or something before I get to that sort of our rating but I have some other projects in mind so this tube has a laser measurement graph on it so this is from the factory it's certified by some University in China they do an actual wattage test to prove that it is a hundred and fifty watts output maximum the apéro is 150 watts the agreed power is a hundred and thirty watts which means that this Ricky w6 is really a hundred thirty what rube at normal output you don't need to do rate this with really cheap tubes you have to do rate them a personal so it's already done for you which is super nice we've got a nice big silicon cap here over the high voltage input to really helps keep down any safety issues further along the tube we have my little red dot beam combiner so that's the red dot laser there we've got a lens here which is zinc selenide the same as your lens in the front of the laser it bounces a good portion of the red dot beam and doesn't and passes pretty much all of the laser beam so the laser beam bounces off this mirror and passes straight through this lens and a large amount of the red light is going to bounce off and get in the same beam path as the infrared laser which is awesome so on top of here I have a pack of 200 zeiss lens wipes you've got to keep your lenses clean you've got to keep your mirrors clean residue gets on them keep them clean with good quality lens wipes don't use anything which could have any speck of dust or material on it which could scratch your lambs these are always clean they're designed for optics awesome choice very cheap on Amazon and that takes us back around the front the only thing I'd really note on this is this has very heavily tinted acrylic we don't have brilliant lighting in this workshop we use photography lights whenever we're working on stuff and this makes it really hard to see what's inside it's just to reduce glare but stuff I'm doing doesn't really had Blair if I hadn't known now gonna put this in here I would have specified just clear acrylic the tinting has nothing to do with it stopping reflected light the reflective light of this is a hundred percent absorbed by acrylic even if you put a tenth of a millimeter of acrylic on here you would be a hundred percent protected from reflected light so overall in this laser I'm really happy with what I got so I spent six thousand US dollars to get it to the UK I spent about a thousand pounds on mostly paperwork fees from EQ line if I was buying this again I would have had it all fees paid customs paid everything paid - EQ line in China they charged me saying like 400 pounds in clearance fees and documentation fees and things not from the government I have zero problem paying the value-added tax and Julie's on this that's expected that's normal I'm not trying to avoid that however 350 pounds for like a documentation fee which is basically just EQ line saying hey we got it to the government and calculating your duties for you I had to tell them the HS code I tell them everything like that's an align if I had I've got that sorted at the Chinese side and paid for it basically door-to-door cost that would have been much cheaper so I could have saved myself some money on that but for that six thousand US dollars I got the laser engraver two blowers two chillers two laser tubes three honeycomb beds you know fourth axis rotary axis for this which I haven't shown you I haven't used it yet I got a hell of a lot for my money really this is going to cost you about three thousand nine hundred and fifty US dollars just the machine the laser like the as specified here was three thousand nine hundred fifty US dollars if you go for a small tube you can get that down much cheaper Andy at AK Tech was really quite good to deal with however if you're interested in purchasing a Chinese laser you can email laser at mythic crafts comm we're gonna set that up as a email which you can send us questions to we get nothing out of it but I'm gonna help you through the process dealing with Chinese laser companies making sure you get the specification you need the power you need or don't need because if you're doing a lot of engraving you do not want 150 watt to block I have I'm doing awful lot of cutting with my laser so I wanted a more powerful tube to make that go faster so I'll help you work through the process of buying a Chinese laser getting it specified to your requirements getting its eyes to your eye 1390 laser is barely any more expensive than a 690 900 by 600 millimeter 2 foot by 3 foot laser is basically exactly the same price as a 1.3 meter by 900 millimeter laser which is what 4 foot by 3 foot I'm really pleased with this there's certainly a few things which act tech could have done spending a couple more dollars on the machine and it potentially could have been a little bit nicer you know just spending the time before delivery to just wipe the machine out get loose screws out of the bottom it's been a lot of time getting the bed perfectly leveled off putting an heiress is solenoid in there so I'd cost me 12 pounds or so on Amazon they probably could have done that for two or three dollars and it wouldn't have added really any cost to the machine but it would have made life a lot easier so that the functionality and the software does what it says it does air assist on off very simple I think a couple of things they could have done a little bit differently but overall having owned Chinese lays before having worked with lasers which cost 50,000 pounds almost 10 times the cost of this from European and American brands I'm exceptionally happy with this the bed structure on this alone is so superior to every other laser I've owned which is come out of China that this laser is worth it for that alone I'm super impressed with the bed structure and closure on this so if you're interested in owning a Chinese laser consider emailing a laser at mythic crafts comm it'll be in the description below I will help you out are you absolutely nothing for that I'm hoping if we get enough interest and sales through it over the next year or so they may be able to give me a slightly bigger discount on a large CNC rather than eyes otherwise get but that's all I get out of it I just want to help you guys get the correct tool for what you want I know a lot of people are interested in buying lasers or have bought lasers and not being happy with them so let's see if we can help you out with that if you enjoyed the video please leave a like if you like think this layer is fantastic leave a like love to hear your comments below if you've got any if you would like to have a look at something other videos see if this is a channel which you think might be interesting we got lasers woodworking CNC stuff all sorts of projects would love to have you along for the journey please hit subscribe we're uploading fairly regularly thank you very much for watching and have a fantastic day

Channel: The Woodshop Life

Views: 12,874

Keywords: Woodworking, woodwork, workshop, woodshop, diy, hand made, lathe, router, cnc, laser, saw, wood, project, handmade, ruida, rdc6332g, acctek, chinese laser, reci, leadshine, review, tool review, tools

Id: fWIXUZ4hHBQ

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018