NEJE Max 4 E80 - Review and Material Testing - Free Mods

[Music] hi my name is Bill welcome to my channel I started this channel a while ago um because as a hobbyist and a builder I have tons of projects and pretty much all of these projects I use YouTube to research um tools and methodology and different tips and tricks to help me with some of my builds and I started this video uh these videos as a way to hopefully give back and provide some information to those of you that have helped me so many times over the years so this is a little bit of a different video for me um I'm starting a couple of projects here and in the interest of full disclosure NJ reach out to me reached out to me and they offered me the use of one of their lasers and some of my projects to see what I thought and how they could help me with some of the things that I'm working on right now so little bit different video um but here's the thing is I'm a Tradesman I love tools and how could I say no so thanks for watching all right here we are fully assembled uh the assembly process was pretty easy um the x-axis Carriage is pretty much fully assembled and it just need to be slid onto these uh beefy y-axis rails and then a matter of eight bolts I'm not going to go through that process cuz there are a lot better videos than mine out there that you can look at but it's a pretty simple process overall the fit and finish on all the metal components I really like um as a CNC machinist I like the fact that the belt tensioners here are bead blasted all the edges are nicely debur all the edges on the rails are machine chamfer which is nice beefy yaxis rails one of the most impressive things for me is this x-axis linear guide rail which I did not expect um Precision ground Harden there are recirculating ball bearings uh bearings within this uh carriage in there that rides along in the x-axis and it adds quite a bit of strength and rigidity for helpful that should help with repeatability I'm pushing down relatively pretty hard on this without any deflection that I can notice um I like that the airist hose is run through the carriage already done and it's just a simply a matter of putting the fitting into the side of the laser module and your air assist is already routed comes all the way out the other side here by the electronics uh one criticism I guess this cable guide it comes with two of them one for the y axis one for the x-axis and I did managed to get this one on um really the documentation isn't really great as far as final detailed assembly there are a couple of generic uh Wiki sites uh NJ Wiki and n99 that you have to search through but the information is very general very basic and uh you have to hunt if you need anything really detailed so if I had a criticism the documentation would be one but I did manage to get that and I really like that because I did have routing problems with my old Master 2s um another thing I noticed during the assembly that wasn't that could I think could have been improved is for the mounting of the laser module you have these little tiny thumb screws which are somewhat blocked by the housing of the module so I have big sausage fingers so they were a little tough to get my fingers on and tighten but having said that they do not require very much tension at all to positively hold this in place I haven't noted any slippage as I've been actuating up it up and down so this nice piece of aluminum Extrusion to keep the cables in place very nice so uh yeah it looks good so let's get on with some testing before we get the max 4 into the enclosure for testing I do want to take a quick look back at the master 2s just for comparison this is the NJ Master 2s which I did buy with my own money um pretty light duty machine it was my first fory into laser engraving and laser cutting and it was a good machine for what it did um made some little boxes here and cuts through 3mm uh ply 8 in plywood pretty easily uh actually takes three or four different passes so a little bit underpowered 7 and A2 7 and 1/2 WT laser uh little motor mounts and firewalls for some of the RC planes that I do uh the wife sometimes uses it for engraving coasters and things like that so it does great for that uh purpose um it's pretty light duty the actual Corner mouting plates are plastic so it does have a little bit of flex to it um if I move the Y AIS you can see the main motor plates are all plastic so not necessarily that big of a deal for what I'm doing but I was really happy to see that the uh the new version is quite a bit more robust than the old um this one does have a couple mods that I did because it does have have a manual z-axis you actually have to loosen up this screw to raise the laser up and down for reaching Focus I had to make an extension plate uh 3D printed out of this blue plastic here and then I had to do an homegrown air assist because this didn't come with uh air assist built in I had to make a modification here which ended up working out pretty well um models for that are up on thing of verse um if you search for readen space you'll be able to find those but both of those mods because the new machine has a automatic Zac AIS and built-in air assist routing uh much better much better one of the things I was concerned about was how well this um new laser was going to fit into my enclosure which I did make for the old Master 2s and as you can see it fits in there almost perfectly the overall sizes in length and width um are almost exactly as from the version 4 to the version 2s so no concerns there uh the tension adjusters stick out just a little bit but that's not a big problem uh my door Clos is just fine I've got a room for my uh pumps up there which I'll talk about a little bit more later and my exhaust fan is still there I do have this vyl vinyl flap in the front so if I'm using longer pieces I can have them stick out of the work envelope of the laser so no problem fits in there perfectly and I'm really happy about that just out of curiosity I did run a positioning and repeatability test using a indicator so I positioned it onto the side of the laser housing and I sent the laser back to a kind of a central position in X and Y and then brought it back at a relatively rapid speed and repeatability was well within a half a thoul now just to give you a sense of accuracy one of these graduations is about 1 six the thickness of a human hair uh I went back even further brought it back and I was really pleased with the positioning accuracy won't get in too much about about the z-axis but um as far as setting my focus zero height it's simply a matter of um homing the Z AIS then I'll raise the laser module up a little bit High just for safety and then I'm going to send it down to my focus point which on this machine is going to be 44 mm from [Music] home and then once it's there I'll use my my height setting gauges um I designed these and put these on ferse a while ago but I'll include a link uh down in the comments and set it 25 mm from the body of the laser so I'll loosen up the thumb screws on the other side drop it down till it touches tighten those up and then there's my focus height and I'll just hold my z-axis again got to say I'm a huge fan of that really easy really repeatable very nice another great touch is these threaded holes that are equally spaced on both of the x-axis frames so these are threaded for uh 4mm screws so I was able to design a a locating system here for these these plates which help me quickly get uh things squared [Music] up and I they're located up at the top as well so I can mount my uh my squares and standoffs directly to the frame for easier squaring and locating of [Music] parts I am running air assist for all the material tests in the past I ran my airbrush pump which was it worked okay uh it was a bit loud and in cuts of over 10 minutes it tended to get pretty hot so I quickly switched over to a dedicated air assist pump um it's much quieter can run for long periods of time uh great air pressure and I'm pretty happy with that [Music] [Music] started off pretty simple with this test and I'm really happy with the results you can see on that first cut I did not turn on the air assist um and the charring went away once I did finally turn that on very good test very happy single pass without pushing the laser too hard [Music] I did do some testing to look at the Precision cutting ability of the laser and when I did offset for the width of the laser curve which was something like 35 of millim uh I did compensate for that and did get slugs that were almost exactly 20 mm me long and it was repeatable I cut about a half a dozen of these things and they all came out extremely accurate so uh pretty happy with this test as [Music] well [Music] oh [Music] here's a test cut in 1/4 in delin plastic I had a piece laying around it cut pretty well at 100% 100 mm per minute I did two passes with the second pass at a 3 and 1/2 in 3 and2 mm depth of cut uh please note that when you do cut delin and overheat it um it releases faldy so as I was showing off the part the faldy fumes kind of started to get into my eyes and Thro a little bit um if you do cut this make sure your exhaust fan is running and let it do its job before you open up the enclosure to get in there here's a test with black foam board from Hobby Lobby 5mm I had to try quite a few different settings to try to get a good mix of heat and speed to try to minimize uh the foam recessing from the paper layer when it's done you don't want to get too much of that um I think some more testing is needed but uh these are kind of the settings that gave me the best results for now flight test foam board is a material that I use quite a bit in my builds especially for RC airplanes and it's one that I've never really had luck with with my older laser at 7 and2 Watts I can never get through the highly reflective white poly styro foam layer so I figured why not give it another try this one has quite a bit more horsepower than the last laser so I spent quite a bit of time trying different settings different focal distances I tried high speed low power low speed high power different depth to cut numerous passes but that reflective Center layer um just wouldn't let me get through it um typically I use it just to cut the fa the paper on the top and then use an X-Acto Knife to trace through it now having said that in a fit of frustration I decided to max out the power and just try to blast through that foam layer just to see what would happened and as you can guess yeah I started a fire no luck with this material so after that little fire I decided to inst install the NJ door switch which is essentially a uh an emergency stop so it just plugs into the main board here um I did design a little housing that mounts right to the side of my enclosure and so while you're cutting should you need to hit the button shuts off the laser shuts off the travel all good so emergency stop switch from Naj I think it's only like something like 15 bucks but I'll have this uh 3D printed part up in the a link in the description as well so there you have all the testing I've done with the materials I have on hand so in summary overall the mechanical construction the workmanship the um thought they put into making improvements to this one over previous versions can I think you can tell that they've been listening to the customer base and listening to the feedback they've gotten and made these improvements um the overall capability of the new laser the e80 laser module it's very powerful it um obviously you can see it can cut pretty thick material so cons or possible criticisms for the machine not much I think you could see by the testing that it's a very capable machine it's very solid it's very accurate um it's well built and precise um if I did had to have to critique something it would probably be just the documentation um I'd like to see it Consolidated maybe in one place more specific to the actual products and just less copy and pasted out of the instruction manual that would be a nice thing to see um ergonomics I have big fat fingers if you don't not going to be an issue there and even for me it's really not an issue at all um and because of the 20 wat laser you're going to be doing a lot probably lot more cutting than you think you will um and having said that it'd be nice especially with the active z-axis to have this EOP um it's an expensive button it's only like 122 or $15 so it would be nice to see them Chuck one of those in any box they ship out so you have it on hand um not a big deal to add it on afterwards but those are just my thoughts about things they could possibly do to improve Naj is having a contest for any products or art that you're creating with a laser engraver or Cutter it doesn't have to be a NJ laser so any laser that you may have is eligible so I'm eager to see what you're out there in the world creating and so is NJ there are cash prizes involved so please check the link in the description for this contest and submit what you have when you're thinking about spending money to add functionality and capability to your Workshop um hopefully this video gives you a bit more detailed information and what you can expect uh from this uh Naj Max 4 laser and hopefully it gives you uh more power to make a better informed decision on where you spend your money so thanks a lot for watching and uh keep a lookout for other videos coming up

Channel: ReedInSpace

Views: 4,181

Keywords: NEJE, laser, Engraver, neje max 4, Prusa, e80 laser, 3d printing, flite test, foamboard, e80, laser cutting, laser engraving, engraving, enclosure

Id: M3zuT3ogGAE

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023