How to make a laser engraver ALTERNATIVE for your CNC pen plotter

in this bonus episode of The Wooden pen powder build series I'm going to show you how to convert your regular pen plotter into a thermal engraver capable of burning Graphics like these into wood and similar materials [Music] there's this thing going on where once people get bored of watching their plowder draw stuff with a regular pen they strap a laser engraver module to it to increase usefulness of the device as well as push out the day they inevitably get bored of it all together I built this plotter with the sole intention of putting an engraver on it immediately since I was already part of it to begin with so now with the pen powder finished we just need to build the engraver module for it build one of course build one I'm not gonna stick a 100 laser module on a pen plotter that literally costs zero dollars to build that's just not in the budget besides I bought this laser module for my next bigger project and enclosed A2 paper-sized laser cutter as usual built from as much reused material as possible though I still haven't finished designing it yet so please bear with me for a while so we want to build an engraver and as luck will have it it has been brought to my attention that the quarter watt laser diode inside these common DVD drives is actually sufficiently powerful to do some light laser engraving but there is a catch we are not going to build a lasering raver simply because many of the people who would resort to building a laser engraver out of an old DVD drive are likely the very ones who apparently missed out on the concept of safety and should not be messing around with lasers and especially not be allowed to make videos showing others how to do it in an unsafe way and since my eyes even though they aren't as good as they once were are pretty much at the top of my list of body parts I would not want to live without I'm not going to mess around with lasers either at least not in the rush of making a video and certainly not without doing the necessary research to procure appropriate safety goggles I don't trust these ones so we need something safer something for the people and looking at my two most popular videos ever we already have an answer why not build a teeny tiny wood burning iron that can be attached to the plotter like any pen allowing us to burn patterns and Graphics into the wood using the CNC that's inherently safer than lasers and also orders of magnitude easier to build so let's do it we're going to start off with a generic almost 2 in steel nail this one is one and a half millimeters in diameter stainless steel would probably be better if you can find one though I only have lists so I'm gonna use it the tip of this nail needs to be ground down into kind of a ball point I'm doing this on my grinder because I have it but if you don't have all these Machine Tools you can achieve the same thing with a file and some sandpaper just takes a little bit longer also worth mentioning the smaller you make the ball point the finer the details you'll be able to transfer but also the smoother and harder the surface of your work piece needs to be for the tip not to get stuck in it next we need to calculate the heating element which is actually really easy we're aiming for a total power draw of anywhere between 10 and 15 watts for the tip to get hot enough to really burn things fast enough so to find out how much current we need to push through the heating element at a given voltage we simply divide our chosen wattage by the supply voltage we want to use I'm going to use this 7.5 volt power supply which gives me a current of exactly 2 amps and almost as though I had planned this through my power supply can deliver 2 amps at 7.5 volts now since it's really the resistance of the heater wire that decides how much current will flow at a given voltage we actually want to know that resistance so we simply divide our supply voltage by the amount of amps we want to go through the heater which gives us the resistance we're looking for easy enough right finally since it's never a good idea to run things at their max power all the time I'm going to round up that resistance to an even 4 Ohms which should drop the current just under 1.9 amps of course that also means my overall power will be less than 15 watts but since 15 was nothing but an arbitrary number to begin with that doesn't really matter does it to make the heating element I'm going to use this 0.2 millimeter 32 gauge Kanthal wire I got off AliExpress kantho basically does the same thing as nichrome they seem to be interchangeable and I'm simply using the multimeter to measure off a 4 ohm piece add an extra inch and cut it off keep in mind the higher your supply voltage the longer the wire will be and at some point we'll just run into the physical limitations of winding that wire onto half an inch of our nail this is already longer than I'd like it to be back at the electronic Spanish for assembly we need some Thin fiberglass leaving I usually Salvage the stuff from dead compact Russell lamps hence why I only have short pieces of it but in this case it suits me quite well actually since I merely need half an inch or 12 millimeters then we put a kink in our heater wire half an inch from one end stick the bend into the fiberglass sleeve and jam in the nail making sure the ball Point only sticks out by about a millimeter then fold over the heater wire without fraying the end of the fiberglass sleeve too much and since the nail actually acts as one termination point for the heater let's measure how much we have left on the other side to get four ohms technically it should be exactly half an inch but as usual reality doesn't play by the rules so to terminate the other end we need some normal copper wire and I'm going to use this stuff which is five strands pulled out of an old cable and twisted together just like that I'm also going to twist the copper and heater wires together yeah my half inch might have turned into 20 millimeters but that's okay with the starting point securely clamped in a pair of pliers we can wind our heating element the goal here is to wind it as tightly as possible onto the sleeve to give the other end the best possible chance of a good electrical connection with the nail as well as putting the windings as close together as possible without shorting them out we really want the heating element to be extremely compact to put a maximum of heat into the tip rather than wasting it on heating the Plover or the air and it looks like that actually took less space than I anticipated good to fix the end of the winding I'm simply going to twist the tail from before with the rest of the wire foreign [Music] since the heating coil took up less space than expected I can crop the extra fiberglass and push the entire thing further down the tip then we need another piece of thicker fiberglass sleeve to protect the heating element this piece simply slides over the coil and after bending over that little tail I'm going to wind that copper wire back up around the outside brutally tight a simple Notch should be enough to make sure it doesn't come loose again one last resistance check seems like I lost 0.2 or 3 ohms after all probably should have stuck to those 12 millimeters for terminating the canthal instead of doing 20 but it doesn't matter the resistance was rounded up anyway there we go that's it almost done now we need to connect some wires to it and since this nail including everything around it gets pretty toasty we have to use some special high temperature wire to do so this wire has silicone sheathing with fiberglass braided around it and it's intended for high temperature applications now do not fear if you don't have any of this stuff at hand it can easily be salvaged from old electric ovens cooktops toaster ovens clothing irons space heaters you name it pretty much anything with wiring in close proximity to heating elements has this high temperature wire in it to connect this wire to our heating element we're in a bit of a pickle soldering is out of the question since this nail well gets literally as hot as a soldering iron and while we could easily twist these wires together that wouldn't work so well for the nail what you usually do to correctly terminate wires like this is crimp them and that's exactly what we're gonna do [Music] foreign down the upper end of the nail to only half its thickness so now I actually have a chance of bending it into a u-shape to pinch the wire in but if I were to try that right now the nail would simply snap off remember it's made of steel and Steel's brittle we first need to anneal this end by heating it red hot with a lighter or blow torch and then letting it cool off slowly I'm also going to re-anneel it after bending it about halfway simply because this Bend is rather tight and I don't feel like remaking the entire thing just because I broke the nail and just before putting in the wire make sure to clean off all the oxides and soot on the inside of the eyelet otherwise you won't get a good electrical connection then just slide in the wire and squeeze it shut with some pliers or side cutters [Music] foreign [Music] with the wires neatly attached it's time to add some kind of handle for that you can use pretty much any piece of metal tube that fits in your pen powder I personally am going to use this stainless steel shell of what used to be an actual ballpoint pen the other half of which I also made my proof of concept with the next and second to last step is probably the most difficult one being rather messy and kind of a race against the time we whip up some plaster of Paris making sure we don't use too much powder nor too much water it really needs to have an almost runny consistency for it to work this gets poured shoved and squished into the tube around the wires to pop those connections as well as create a structural Anchor Point for the nail in a nutshell we're gluing the nail into the tube using plaster I think the cream needs to be at least 10 millimeters deep in the plaster for the nails to get enough structural support So as not to wiggle itself loose after a while on the other hand if you buried too deep it may be sturdier but you're gonna lose a lot of heat to the handle Placer is not a great heat to doctor but it isn't Magic either unfortunately while you're at it also try to get it settled in straight as well as centered in the tube it doesn't affect functionality if it's crooked but you know looks nicer oh yeah and also makes sure not to get the bare wires sorted inside the plaster I know it's hard without x-ray vision but at least you can find solids in the fact that this engraver isn't going to burn out your low-key human Vision as well that being said the outer wire is allowed to touch the metal tube just not both of them and they shouldn't be touching each other it just doesn't work so well with the supply shorted out then I guess just wait until everything starts solidifying once the plaster has set let it dry really well and I mean really really well let it dry for at least a week just to be sure one week later well my proof of concept here at least didn't rust as much as the new one did but now for some cleanup [Music] foreign [Music] I also went ahead and extended the wires with some normal temperature cable including the little connector on the end to plug in the power supply absolutely nothing fancy going on here this thing is basically just slapped right across the power supply which means we're now ready for the burn in it's the first time you heat this up it's going to smoke quite a lot for a while until all the volatiles in the fiberglass leaving finish burning off so obviously do this in a well ventilated area and not in the basement like the bad example I'm setting here thing is as far as I know this fiberglass sleeve is technically not rated for the temperatures we're pushing it to here once it's burned in it gets all white and kind of brittle which poses no problem as long as you don't Smack the heating element around after that you see I could have done it properly use what should be used in an application like this which is Mica foil but people always want the easy way and since this stuff works almost as well while also being easily accessible I of course chose this far little tutorial today as a result this is rather hang on why is it glowing it wasn't supposed to get that hot seems like 15 watts was a tad optimistic my proof concept was 10 watts and I wanted a little more oomph but apparently 50 extra power are just too much heat on that little nail for it to not get red hot would make for a delightfully fast wood burning experience though however with a pen Powder made from wood I just don't feel comfortable enough having something red hot that close to it the next day Well turns out I'm an idiot my proof of concept was actually only 5 Watts which I had completely forgotten and since tripling the power clearly wasn't the best idea I made an entirely new Burning tip yes I could have just used the lower voltage power supply to get the power down but I don't happen to have any 6.5 volts 2 amp wall charger laying around so since these things literally only take an hour to make I simply made a new one exactly the same except it's now 10 watts instead of 15. still double of what I originally had but hopefully not quite enough to make it Glow so if you want to build one of these for yourself you should actually be aiming for something between 5 and 10 watts unless you want to try and burn holes in your work piece that is but let's finish that burn in now where was I oh yeah I wanted to say this thing is a prototype rather than a full-fledged product like you'd usually see me do this wood burning tip is just way too hacked together for my liking but it's easy and works like a charm and that's why I wanted to share it with you guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you installing it on the plotter is literal Child's Play just stick it in instead of the pen and zip tie the cable out of the way let it heat up and use the plotter just like normal since the darkness of the line is directly related to the feed raid you could theoretically even draw large grayscale images with it [Music] thank you songs I have no idea why it ruined my nice flower by stringing a line right between those two petals definitely follow the program I have the impression of this g code generator doesn't handle so many single lines and it's going to do another one right up here in a bit unless I can prevent it which I fully intend to do [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] as you can see I also stuck to my ridiculous naming scheme and so I'm calling this laserless engraving tip chronic burner thing now use this information at your own risk even without a laser this thing is still very much a huge fire hazard and should never be left running unattended in fact the handle on this thing still gets hot enough to slightly discolor the wooden pen holder in my machine so take this as a warning burning your house or in fact anything down is not cool hope you enjoyed I'm gonna stick this to the wall like a trophy now bye [Music]

Channel: Chronic Mechatronic

Views: 5,543

Keywords: chronic mechatronic, DIY, technology, mechanical engineering, CNC, unipolar stepper motor arduino, electronics, homemade, arduino, arduino pen plotter, unipolar stepper motor, arduino cnc, diy cnc arduino, DIY CNC, DIY arduino pen plotter, diy plotter, cnc plotter, 28byj-48 stepper motor, 28byj-48 stepper motor arduino, 28byj-48 stepper motor cnc, arduino CNC, diy arduino cnc drawing machine, diy laser engraver, laser module, cnc engraving, laser engraving machine, laser engraver

Id: zB59hg8QerY

Length: 18min 47sec (1127 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2023