The Cheapest Laser Engraver On Amazon

so recently i did a video on the cheapest cnc router on amazon it got me thinking what is the cheapest laser engraver on amazon and what is it capable of let's get it open see what it looks like all right let's see what we got here this is very well packed so this is the jl3 engraving machine all right so i paid 99 for this on amazon under a hundred dollars and this is what you get and so let's let's get in here and see what we got oh some safety glasses that was not what i was expecting the first box this is the actual laser itself packaged really well let's see if this thing looks like this looks clean nothing is scratched like everything is packaged really really well which is one of the corners that they could cut really easily for 99 bucks you know where do you put your money and they've definitely put some time and effort into packaging i'm going to finish getting all these pieces out of the box and then it's going to be time to assemble i'm always a little nervous when assembling these pieces because the instructions usually aren't that good but let's see how this goes alright so i can already tell that this is going to go fairly well we've got a lot of pictures these instructions are actually really really good all right i'm gonna get assembling and then i'll let you know for sure [Music] all right so the laser is all assembled i was really impressed with the instructions and the ease of assembly and again i bought this myself so everything i'm saying here is just my opinion no one's paying me for any of this this is just my experience i've assembled seven eight nine of these types of machines and for this price point for under a hundred dollars i was expecting to have to install like every nut and bolt but under an hour you can have this thing up and going they even labeled the packages of all the nuts and bolts that corresponds with the instructions so ease of assembly this thing i don't think it could be much easier all right so the next step is to get everything set up to be able to actually make things now we're going to be testing this out like i said before and see what it's capable of i'm going to try a couple different materials and go from there one of the potential pain points with budget lasers like this is the software it needs to control it so this particular laser comes with its own software rather than using light burn which i normally use i'm just going to use what comes with it that will get a good representation of what actually it does so i learned this before assembling these types of machines don't just toss the thumb drive to the side like i did there's actually a full six minute assembly video that really would even make it faster to assemble you do need a computer or a laptop to control this laser but that's all you need other than what comes in the box all right so two things we need to do before we actually start carving one we need to set the focal height this is a fixed focus diode laser in the instructions here it says to be six millimeters above the material that you're engraving six millimeters is just under a quarter of an inch so if i stack two of these together on top of the material that i am carving or engraving that should be where the laser head is the second thing that we need to do before we get started is make sure we have our safety goggles now on these lasers there's a bunch of warnings all over it's always a good idea to have glasses but with lasers that don't have that protective area make sure you're wearing your safety glasses these stylish safety glasses [Music] all right so it just finished up and you can see the detail here now this is fairly dark and aggressive i could have went a little bit lighter uh overall it took about a half an hour to cut this detail isn't super crisp but i might be able to change that in the settings but that's pretty impressive for the first test now let's do this second test [Music] [Music] all right so looks like it turned out really nice look at that all right so this one took about a half an hour as well like 35 minutes and here's for a scale you see there's my finger and i increased the speed to a hundred percent but i increased the contrast so you know how the other letters uh the first one i did was a little uh rough on the edges i increased the contrast and that seemed to really sharpen the image up that looks really really good but what if you don't have any wood let's try a piece of paper here now i have no clue on the settings for the paper i was at a hundred and hundred on the wood and so i'm going to go down to 50 and just see what happens well that was really interesting so it doesn't like the white maybe it's reflecting because at each blue dash here it printed and then it i got off the paper here and it did on that too all right different color paper all right so this material came in the box so just basically cardstock card paper okay my star was a little big it doesn't matter though but it did engrave uh on the paper and on the table so you can see the perfect star um if you were gonna use this thing a bunch i would set up a jig where uh you put your piece in every time and that way you knew where it was lining up not just guessing like i am i'm gonna do one more test with this paper i'm gonna try to cut it see if it'll cut this paper i'm slowing down the cut speed to 50 and putting the power all the way up to 100 i don't know what's gonna happen [Music] so i let my paper on fire it did cut it look at this got a star so if you want some shapes if you're going for the burnt singed look then i recommend it but the thing is is that if you dialed in these settings i'm sure you could cut this fairly well one of the main differences between budget lasers like this budget diode lasers and higher end lasers say the glowforge or like those types of lasers is the software these budget lasers take a lot more time to dial in those speed settings to where the higher lasers have those preset and a lot of that stuff figured out for you so one last test i want to do is we need to see really how powerful this is we've engraved it is a engraving laser but let's see how deep it can engrave and so i'm going to slow it way down and go full power and see the results that we [Music] get all right so this right here is 100 power 10 speed i learned you can actually speed it up as you go so i sped it up to 80 right here because obviously this was making a lot of smoke so i sped it up to 80 right here all the way now it's tough to tell but i can get my fingernail in there but that's like a 16th of an inch in depth that's at 80 i slowed it back down again right here and it's just it's burning a little deeper but obviously that's undesirable it's just makes makes a mess all right after those four tests i can safely say that this laser engraver is more than worth its money 99 bucks honestly i am blown away at uh its capability from the ease of assembly the detailed instructions the quality of engravings that we're getting and how everything comes the only thing you need is to hook it up to a computer and you'll be engraving this thing is by far one of the best values that i've seen and i'm really surprised that it works as well as it does for the price point so if you have any interest in laser engravers and you don't want to spend a lot of money i would say this is a safe bet now just for engraving you're not going to be able to cut anything again remember our test for cutting didn't go so well but this is marketed as a laser engraver not a laser cutter if you want to engrave things like barcodes or qr codes or just some simple art or some fun projects for the kids i think this is a fantastic option for those things now one thing i'm unable to test is the longevity of how long it works i'm not sure what the life expectancy is of a laser like this i used it for several hours today four or five hours and didn't have any issues if you're going to be using this at your house just remember to have some sort of ventilation and make sure you wear these safety glasses that come with it i'll have a link to this exact machine on amazon in the description below if you want to pick one up for yourself if you want to check out the video of the cnc router that i did a couple weeks ago be sure to check that video out that link will be in the description as well be a good comparison to compare the two thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Andy Bird Builds

Views: 800,957

Keywords: andybirdbuilds, cnc, Andy Bird Builds, cnc machine, cnc projects, woodworking, laser engraver, laser, laser machine, laser engraver machine, laser engraving ideas, desktop laser engraver, xtool, what is the cheapest laser engraver on amazon?, top laser printers 2022, best laser engraver, laser engraving wood, cheap laser engraver, laser cutting machine, amazon, woodworking tools, tools, electronics, technology, cnc router, andy bird builds

Id: 5FzPDWqLqVE

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022