DIY 1000W Fiber Laser Cutter Part 1: Project Introduction

foreign this is the current state of my fiber laser cutter it's been an ongoing project for the past six months and I'm going to be making a video series about how I got to this point so if your fiber laser curious stay tuned ever since I saw the first glowforge ads on YouTube uh several years ago I've been fascinated with lasers um I have a 100 watt CO2 laser and it's amazing but metal can't cut metal [Applause] so I looked into uh plasma cutters and found that they didn't really have the detail I was looking for and so I began to thoroughly research the internet for anything about building a fiber laser cutter and I found nothing and that's how this all began I'm going to be sharing some of my experiences with you but please understand I'm a complete novice on this subject lasers can be very dangerous so if you choose to operate one please understand the safety risks and do your own research and please be safe I guess what I said a second ago wasn't entirely true when I was researching the internet to see how to build a fiber laser I did find some Reddit posts of people discussing the idea but the takeaway was that it was too dangerous too expensive and too complicated of a project while I don't necessarily disagree that it's dangerous and expensive I think we can make it less complicated if we take a look at the different systems that make up a fiber laser cutter I'm going to be going over these in more detail in subsequent videos but for now let's just start with um there's the Machine controller which is the brains of the operation it controls the laser cutting system along with the gas assist and it also controls the Gantry system that moves the laser head around there's a cooling system for the laser and that connects directly to the Laser Source and head and then we need to do something with a nasty fume so we need some kind of a fume extractor uh before I go any further I want to tell you about the two major hurdles I had in this project um that actually almost kept me from even starting the project to begin with first is the power requirements that a laser machine like this requires and trying to figure that out in a home garage like this was a challenge a lot of the components I was seeing wanted 380 volts three-phase power which I don't have in a garage and buying a rotary phase converter would just out of my budget so I couldn't go that route and so I was able to find some of the lower wattage components that would run on uh 240 volts and I happen to have uh several slots open still in my electrical panel so I had an electrician come in and stall uh three separate 240 volt lines so I was able to power my Laser Source on one line the water chiller on another line and then all the servo Motors and the controller on another line and then I can also power my exhaust fan on yet a separate 120 volt line now some people are using air compressors uh as their assist gas but I just don't have the the power available in my garage to to go that route one more thing about the Laser Source I bought a rakis 1000 watt Laser Source but you can also get a 1500 watt Laser Source that will also run off 240 volts anything higher than that requires three phase 380 volts second was the assist gas I've never worked with gases before so it was a big learning curve uh understanding uh how to set the systems up and where I get the gas and and the cost and everything was a lot to figure out so depending on what you're cutting you either use a high pressure nitrogen or a low pressure oxygen uh to cut through the metal and alternatively you can substitute the nitrogen with compressed air if you don't care about the edge finish as much now the gas is quite expensive I have both a 300 cubic feet bottle of nitrogen and oxygen and um I think I'm going to be lucky if the nitrogen even lasts an hour of cutting time because it's high pressure it uses a very quick the oxygen is going to last much longer so I'm actually going to experiment with an air compressor that I have it has a very low output but it's capable of 200 PSI so I'm gonna see if I can get away with using it with some very short cuts you know for a part that only lasts maybe 20 30 seconds or something uh I don't know how I almost forgot but there was one other major hurdle for this project and that was the budget um through my research online it seemed like even for a smaller footprint machine commercially available machine that seemed to be in the 30 to 50 000 uh ballpark range just to import a machine and I don't have that kind of money for a hobby project um so even uh this DIY machine costs fifteen thousand dollars to build so um all of my uh component choices and design decisions were based on trying to meet that budget so keep that in mind the most expensive component in this project is the Laser Source I did lots of shopping around there's a company called Cloud Ray laser that sells a lot a lot of the items you need but um they were quite expensive I was able to save at least a couple thousand dollars by importing directly from China um you know I did have to pay shipping and Duty fees but uh in the end I was still able to save money I bought the cheapest laser control system I could find um I purchased uh the laser head that has manual focus I even used the cheapest Servo Motors off of eBay that I could find in order to to bring the scope of this project into this budget so before I close this out let me show you my laser cutting process yeah foreign foreign foreign [Music] [Music] so it's about 20 centimeters I guess it's uh yeah first test it worked it's pretty awesome well that's it for this first video I just wanted to give you an introduction to the project I think next time I'll probably show you um about uh building the Gantry and the frame uh maybe hooking up the motors too uh we'll see all right thanks

Channel: Travis Mitchell

Views: 290,252

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Id: o-eVTnO0tFM

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023