The AlgoLaser Delta Is Loads of Fun

hey today I'm coming to you from my garage because I've got a new toy that I really want to show you I'm really excited about this uh I was contacted recently by the elgo laser company and they asked me if I wanted to review their new Delta model laser engraver so of course the first thing I asked is can it engrave rocks and they said yes it can so here it is I think you're really going to like this thing this is fun this will not be a highly technical review because honestly I just don't have that kind of experience or knowledge first time I've ever even seen a laser engraver is when this showed up in my door I only have a few days of experience so you're going to get the perspective of a complete rookie uh I know this is a rock rated Channel and because of that I'm going to try to keep this at least somewhat rock related before I show you some of the things that I've been making with this let me just show you around the machine a little bit uh this comes pretty much fully assembled the only part I had to put on is this part across here there's two screws there two screws there you have to screw the legs on and there's a little air nozzle that screws on the bottom of this uh other than that it's pretty much all assembled uh there's three belts there's one here there's one over on this side and there's one underneath there uh and it and it tells you it's tighten the belts but it doesn't really tell you how very well uh so I was struggling a little bit there until I realized that they have a YouTube channel and it shows you how to do it on there so once I found that uh that made things much easier uh this is all metal uh it's it's very nicely constructed this does not feel cheap at all it has a little touchcreen here which I think might be the only laser that has one of these uh this is not a common thing so you can run it right from here you can put a little USB thumb drive in over here and then engrave from this you can also control it from your phone or you can control it from a computer I'm actually using it with my Mac and I'm doing it wirelessly over Wi-Fi uh the other thing it comes with is this air pump uh this blows compressed air uh down onto where the laser is and it blows away all the smoke and sawdust and it gives you a cleaner cut this honeycomb B on the bottom here did not come with laser I bought that separately uh what that does is when you're cutting wood it lets the laser go all the way through the wood uh and it doesn't burn the back of the wood if the wood's sitting on a solid surface uh you get some burn marks in the back and you don't get that at all when you use one of these honeycomb beds so my very first project with this was to make this cool little kinetic coaster uh there's a lot of files you can download right off the internet uh I got this one from Etsy a few dollars for it there's a lot of free ones too uh and basically you just import the file into the software and then you print it out on wood you assemble it and you got yourself a neat little toy so uh I know this isn't really rock related unless of course you like your drinks on the Rocks everyone needs a storage space for the rock so I made this little treasure chest for my grandson Joe I didn't design this it's another one I downloaded but you can't believe how tight everything fits together I could have put most of this together with no no glue and would have stayed together just fine I did glue it but I didn't have to this took about 2 hours to print all the pieces uh this is a 22 watt laser which is actually pretty powerful uh 22 Watts doesn't sound like that much but uh there are 5 and 10 watt lasers out there uh I ran this at 50% power when I was cutting it and went slow and easy so I thought that might be better and what's inside pudding stones of course let's talk about rocks uh what I was hoping that I could do is take little slabs like this this is actually an end cut but it's almost flat and I thought I could engrave something on an otherwise Shiny Rock and have the engraved part be kind of a matte finish that's what I was picturing so here's my first attempt I polished the shape of Michigan you can see it's not shiny there which is what I was expecting I wasn't expecting it to be black it's very rough also but then right about where I live up here here it's white I don't know why that is but part of it was black and part of it was white so I tried again next I did this little bear and you can see that the engraving is inconsistent so rocks are made up of more than one mineral in most cases and so I think as it hit different minerals it just reacted a little bit differently uh that was my theory I've been keeping track back here of how fast I'm going I changed the settings from rock to rock trying to get a little different result so this was cutting at500 mm per minute at 30% power and uh was not super happy with those results so I thought I'd switch to unpolished rocks now this is a rock I picked up on Lake Superior and I tried to engrave a deer on it and you can see that it's got a picture of a deer but looking straight on it doesn't show up that well if you get a reflection on it you can see it uh you can feel it a little bit there's a little bit of texture there so I thought well that that's okay not quite as good as I was expecting so I tried again on another rock so here's the next one I tried looks like the same kind of rock but I got completely different results with the same settings so this one I'm really happy with I thought that looked great uh so then I thought oh let's let's try another one uh I did look at this rock and I noticed this one has there's kind of layers in it can you see the little right along there you can kind of see some circles so I thought well maybe this a different kind of rock and this one doesn't show any kind of layers like that I don't know what kind of rocks these are uh my two guesses would be Basalt and grey wacky uh so anyhow uh they look very similar but not exactly the same so then I tried this one uh I figured it's Halloween coming up kids are always coming to the door saying trick or treat and I always give them treats I thought it's time I give him some tricks so I thought I'd give them rocks this year so I grave boo on this one and this one's really interesting cuz that is really raised up it's not engraved in it's actually this the the print there is higher than the rest of the Rock and you can really feel it feels really rough I really like the look of it another rock I tried was this white quartz uh this was under the laser with the same settings as the other rocks and it had absolutely no effect on it so I figured wanted two things happened either the laser went right through it because it's a little more transparent or it reflected off of it uh but it it just did nothing so I tried a Montana egg it and got exactly the same results which was nothing the laser had no effect on it so I thought well maybe the laser just needs something to focus on so I covered it with blue masking tape and when I engraved over here I got this so I was just trying different settings I end up liking this one the best and and so I thought well okay I got this figured out now I know how to do clear rocks so I tried a bear on this one and I had these results uh this was actually all crumbly on the top so I think it was uh engraving too too much on it so I'm a little frustrated with the shiny rocks uh the other rocks are going pretty well all right so let's engrave a rock together I think it's about time I show you how the software works I'm going to stick with my Halloween theme here and engrave another little Rock uh this is about 4 cm across and about 3 cm tall the software I'm using is called lightburn it's available for Windows and Mac and it is a paid app uh there's another piece of software you can use if you have Windows that's free uh but this looks like it's the standard that most people use so I'm happy to be using this one uh I watched a few tutorials and it's really pretty simple to use I was pleasantly surprised one of the problems I've had had is getting my engraving centered on my rock so what I'm going to do is engrave a little Crosshair on a piece of cardboard and I'll use that to Center my rock so I've already drawn a little Crosshair here and whenever you engrave something you assign a color to it so I've assigned green and then I set up green you just double click on this and do a bunch of settings but the main ones are the speed and the power so I'm cutting at 100% power at 5 ,000 mm per minute I'm going to do a line as opposed to filling something in I want to make sure that the Crosshair ends up on the cardboard so I'm just going to check to make sure it does this tool if you click on a spot it'll move the laser head to that spot so that's going to be the middle of my little Crosshair and if I hit the frame button it'll outline where it's going to engrave all right so that looks good so I'm going to hit start all right so there's my little cross here so now I got to go put my rock in the right [Applause] spot that's going to go right about there so now I'm going to write a word on my rock and the word is going to be trick since this is trick or treating and I'm feeling like I'm going to want to trick somebody uh I'm going to import a picture of a bat so here's that and in order to get this to work right uh you need to have this be a vector drawing so there's a nice little tool built in under the tools menu it says Trace image so you do that move this out of the way delete that and there's my traced image so since my rock was is about 4 cm AC CM across I'm going to make this like 3 cm across uh or 30 mm and this one I'm going to make a little bit smaller let's try to make this uh maybe 2 2.5 let's go 2.3 actually 23 mm all right let's drag this up here and this up here zoom in just a little bit so we can see what the heck we're doing all right that's there this down here let's see oops looks pretty good I guess okay so I've already set this one up to fill it's going to go 1,000 mm per minute 100% power I don't want that green line there so I'm going to turn that off there's a little output switch up here I'll just turn it off uh so it's only going to do this part and then I can do a preview so what you're seeing there is all the little scan lines uh the red is just where the laser is moving but not actually turned on okay so it's just the black part that's going to show up so that looks pretty good all right let's do a oh forgot something uh next thing I need to do is focus the laser on the Rock so I'm going to lift the laser up I'm going to put this little thing down that protrudes out the bottom here um just a little bit and that's the that measures your focus all right now I got to move the laser over to the Rock use this tool again I'm going to go down here a little bit because it's actually the upper right and Corner okay that looks good so I've got this little thing down I'm going to lower this and clamp that in place there's a little button right here you push and it pops that right back up all right so that is now focused here we go all right let's see how we did well that one turned out really really nicely a little warm not too warm though there's an app that comes with this here it is I'm going to press engrave it and I want to show you how to make a puzzle so you pick a picture I got one set up in there already change that to 4x6 so it's a 4x6 puzzle 24 pieces go to the next screen and here you can adjust the picture and stuff the image uh I'm going to skip that right now and I'm just going to go to start and I've been trying this for two hours and it gets to 50% and sort of stalls I got up to 90% once but it never uploads the picture so instead of showing you that I'm going to show you the little screen down here and how you can control the laser from there just put the picture that I want to engrave on this USB drive and the ports over here on the side of the machine first thing I need to do is hit control and tell it where I want it to engrave it on the plywood so I'm going to press motion this is set at 100 mm every time I hit one of these buttons then I want to move it 10 mm to the right I played around with this before so I know that's where I want it to be and then I want to go to engrave choose my USB drive this is Joe that's my grandson and there's a picture of Joe with his paski Stone so we're going to hit engrave and first thing I need to do is choose the material I want to you I want to print on and it's plywood uh quality uh I think I want 10 lines per millimeter uh it can go up to 20 lines per millimeter but I think that's going to be too much uh Power I did one of these before and I did 100% power but I think 90% is going to be better it was a little bit dark last last time uh scan is the only mode available so I don't really know what that's supposed to do speed uh 2,000 mm per minute is what I did before and that worked out pretty well and the passes is just how many times you want it to go over the pictur you can have it engrave the whole thing and then go over engrave it all again uh one's going to be plenty size of the picture I would like this to be 100 mm wide and it automattic ically adjust the other one so the picture doesn't get distorted so I'm going to hit start processing and I'm going to press this button this just outlines on the board where it's going to go just make sure it's in the right spot so it's close to the edges but not going off the edges so that's good uh next thing I think is just to hit the engrave button well there it is I think that looks pretty good here's my first attempt which I thought was too dark and as I play around with this more I think I'll get even better at it but for my second attempt I'm really happy with that I think that looks great one of the things I do a lot is cut shape out of rocks and to do that I need to have stencils and the way I've always made my stencils in the past is just to cut them out of card stock so I print it out and then just use an X-Acto Knife and carefully cut it out which is kind of a pain so I'm going to do the same thing using the laser I've got it all set up in the light bur software uh it was really quick to set it up doesn't take long at all once you get the hang of it so I just have to hit the start button and we should get them cut out here pretty quick I could see where this would be really helpful if you're making cards or if you're a scrapbooker uh this cuts out really nicely and really quick I just have one more little project to tell you about and that's my shirt can you believe I made this on the laser it only took about six minutes to engrave and I think it looks pretty cool I've been just having a ball with this machine I just can't believe how many different things you can make with it I haven't quite got the rock thing completely figured out but I think I will I'm just going to have to keep playing with it and I do have a rock and wood project in mind but that's going to have to wait for another video the only complaints I have about it are the phone app that just didn't work very well for me and the lack of documentation uh the book that comes with it that tells you how to set it up is pretty good but that's where it ends they do have a YouTube channel though and they're putting up new videos every day so I think both those things can be corrected and I think they will be keep in mind that this is a brand new machine it just came out and I think it's just going to keep improving over time if you're interested in buying one there's a link in the description uh so check that out and I'll see you next time

Channel: Michigan Rocks

Views: 10,239

Keywords: Michigan Rocks, AlgoLaser Delta, AlgoLaser, laser engraver, diode laser

Id: x1-7mrMYXJM

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2023