In my quest for a new laser I came across this one on eBay.
eBay item# 121755226752
its located in the UK which is good and it appears good value, but I would welcome opinions on it.
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In my quest for a new laser I came across this one on eBay.
eBay item# 121755226752
its located in the UK which is good and it appears good value, but I would welcome opinions on it.
The CW3000 is a cooler for tubes up to 50 watts...it will kill an 80 watt tube.
There is a sticker on the actual CW3000 stating MAXIMUM 50WATT TUBE, given that little bit of info I wouldn't touch it with somebody else's 10 foot pole.
Julian,
This is just anecdotal on my part, but if you do some searches on the forum and on the web for ebay lasers reviews I think you will find a fairly high percentage of unhappy customers. If you arent handy enough and knowledgable enough about electronics and lasers an ebay laser may be more trouble than it is worth. I have to stress again, that is anecdotal on my part. I dont have hard numbers for you, just general impressions from having watched this forum for a year or more and hunting about the internet before I committed to a purchase.
Dave
First apologies for posting the link.
if I bought the machine, I wouldn't use the CW3000 unit, as it doesn't actually have a chiller. I have a CW4000 which would do the job of cooling quite well.
Seller is based in Birmingham and seems to be well established and has a long history, not sure how many lasers they have sold though, don't know if it's any more iffy than buying direct from China. They have offered me free shipping to my address on the Isle of Man which is worth quite a bit. In return they have asked for payment by bank transfer, which I hope is just to avoid credit card charges. I told them if I went ahead I would pay 99% by bank transfer and 1% by credit card as this means the whole purchase price is protected by the credit card company.
No worries Julian! The moderators are really good about keeping us on the straight and narrow.
So long as you are doing due diligence in terms of the seller and what you are getting in the way of equipment and support Ebay can be just fine. We all hear enough tales of woe though that our ears perk up when we hear Ebay mentioned.
Dave
The laser at our last shop was 100watt and we used the cw3000. It the waterdid get a little warm at times, but generally was ok even with running at 100% power for almost two years.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Sheldrake
We must have gotten lucky, or a super great tube. I left that job, but even when I left it was still going strong.
I'm running a 3000 too. But I do very little cutting, most of my work is raster, and rarely gets above 30% power...
The machine looks like a Weike Ju, lemme do some digging and make a couple of calls and I'll get the inside line on that dealer for you :)
If you will PM me, i will share a very reasonable and customer friendly Chinese rep. Ive had mine a year almost, and just ended a chat with them tonight about windows 10
Roy
Thanks for all the replies. I currently run a Shenhui 60w Chinese laser which I self imported about 18 months ago, it has been mostly problem free (just one limit switch failure, which was a £1.50 fix). I have had a price off Shenhui for a similar machine, which after all the importation costs is just a little lower than the one on eBay.
Dave. Thanks for the name of the laser, I will do some more research on it, but anything you can find out too would be appreciated.
From my searching it seems to be this machine: http://www.sign-cnc.com/a/en/Product...n/0306/26.html decided to take the risk and have bought it. Should be with me by Monday.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Sheldrake
Looks like an older AWC controller, deffo not leetro so unlikely to be a Weike, possibly a Shen or one of the Shen based rebadges.
Must admit I'm looking at the AWC 708Plus controller to play with on a 220 watt twin resonator from EFR, I like the idea of a pre-load (trickle) on the tube especially as the rise time of the standard DC tubes isn't brilliant. Could be useful as well having PPI control and true PWM
The machine it turns out is a jqlaser.com laser. I paid for the laser mainly by BACS (Bank Transfer) and £100.00 being paid by on my Credit Card, as this makes the Credit Card Company responsible for the full cost of the machine, if anything went wrong, this gives an extra layer of protection. I was provided with a tracking number and I followed the lasers trip from Birmingham to the Isle of Man. On Saturday I got a call from a local haulage company to say they had the crate and could deliver on Monday. Monday afternoon, they gave me a call on my mobile as I was at work and said they would be at my home address in about twenty minutes. By the time I got home the lorry had arrived and the large crate was soon on my drive. There was no sign of any damage to the crate.
That evening a friend came round to help move the laser it into my garage. It only took a few minutes to take off the crates top and sides. The feet were bolted into position to the bottom of the crate with clamps. Once these were off we used a side of the crate to roll the laser onto the drive. It was just a case of then getting the laser over the slight lip where the drive meets the garage door and it was in the garage, its temporary home for a few days. Packed separately to the machine, was the CW-3000 'Chiller' Unit, an extractor fan and about twenty feed of shiny round duct, an air supply compressor, a USB dongle, instruction booklet and various leads. There was also a small tool box containing a variety of tools and a bag full of nuts and bolts. These were quite handy as the first thing I noticed was one of the door catches had a bolt missing, this was soon sorted.
When I inserted the dongle into my computer to have a look at the software, I discovered that the machine had been supplied with something called PowerCut4311, which I had never heard of (http://www.jqlaser.com/download_deta...oadsId=10.html). When I was Discussing purchasing the laser with the supplier I was given the option of either PowerCut or LaserCut 5.3. As I had heard of LaserCut, I opted for this as I thought the support would be better, I didn’t get it. The other thing that was missing was the red dot pointer. In my questions I specifically asked if one was included and was told yes. An email was fired off to the seller about these two points and they did reply quickly. On the red dot pointer, I was told the salesman got it wrong and he should have checked if it had one or not, they said they would contact the manufacturer to see if one could be retro fitted. On the software they said PowerCut was good but they would look into what could be done about supplying me with LaserCut, but I take it the controller is tied to the software so I don’t think it will be an easy change.
Over the next few days I played with the software, as I wouldn’t be setting up the machine until the weekend. Major problem was with importing dxf files, there were massive gaps between what should have been continuous lines. The close function would only work on some of them and the results were distorted. Eventually I found that by deselecting a couple of the import options sorted this out. There was also a neat option to atomically close the lines when the file is imported, one up on Laser Works. There was nothing in the menus about ‘grouping’ objects and nothing in the manual at all about this. Eventually I found that there were numerous grouping options available when you right click the mouse, so another issue sorted. The more I used the software the more it appears to be far superior to Laser Works 6 which I use on my other Laser and most likely better than LaserCut 5.3.
Saturday (yesterday) was setting up day. The new machine was going into my workshop which backs onto my garage and the laser already in there was being relegated to the garage. Luckily I have a four foot wide doorway between the garage and the workshop, so it was simple matter of wheeling it in. The extractor fan was connected first complete with its ducting. On testing the fan, the silver duct expanded and filled half the workshop, so I cut this down drastically. The duct was vented through the same 6” hole through the wall that served my other laser. The laser tube only took a couple of minutes to fit into place and the ‘chiller’ filled with distilled water and connected to the laser tube with the supplied silicone tubes. The air compressor was connected and then plugged into one of the power outlets on the back of the machine.
The machine was connected to my PC with a 10 metre USB lead and then I switched the machine on. The display lit up and the laser head homed itself. On the PC the laser was detected and the USB drivers installed automatically. Once complete I started PowerCut and the machine was recognised straight away.
Alignment of the mirrors came next, or it would have done if I had needed to do any. I checked where the laser was making a mark on pieces of thermal tape and in all positions on the bed the centres were being hit. I took the lens out of the laser head and gave it a clean as there was a little dust on it. Happy with things so far I decided to run a couple of small tests, circles and squares. The PC software sent the file over the laser and a picture of what was to be cut appears in the LCD Display. I was using fairly low power and 200mms speed, the square cut well, but the circle cut too deep, the laser slows right down on circles and corners which resulted in cuts being too deep. I thought there would be a solution to this and would find it later.
I mainly cut 3.6mm plywood. On my 60W Shenhui I can cut at around 16-18mms at 95% power. On this machine I am cutting through the plywood at 45mms second with 60% power. I also tried some 6mm plywood and at 70% power can cut through at a speed of 25mms.
The laser has a knife edge bed, which works okay, but you have to watch for pieces of plywood which have just been cut out as they can tilt upwards rather than fall out. If the laser head then hits them, it dislodges the work I’m cutting. I think I will invest in a honeycomb bed in the near future. I may also see if I can source some sort of metal tray which can sit on the Z Bed below the knife edge bed to catch and cut pieces to make disposal easier.
I thought I might have been able to use my CW-4000 Chiller rather than the CW-3000 ‘Chiller’ which came with the machine, but this isn’t possible as the CW-4000 doesn’t have a socket for the flow alarm. I will see how I get on with the CW-3000, but may upgrade to a proper Chiller such as the CW-5000.
The machine itself seems to be well made, it’s very sturdy and solid, the lid is very heavy and has proper glass windows. The wiring all seems to be neat and tidy and so far other than a missing catch bolt, everything appears as it should do. Setting up was straight forward and was done in a couple of hours. The Software is much better to what I’m used to. The low speed for circles and corners can be adjusted in the parameter settings menu, but you can’t save these without a password, which I don’t have. I managed to get over this my changing the required settings in the config file, but a password would be nice so I can make changes from within the programme.
Overall I’m so far pretty impressed with the machine. It cost me £4,930.00 and this included delivery to my home address. This is almost the same price I had been quoted for a similar machine self imported direct from China, but without the wait. It also a heck of a lot less than similar Chinese machines from other UK suppliers. Fingers crossed that it remains problem free.
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That was some fast delivery! A week and a half from the date you ordered it, is that correct? Congrats on the machine happy to hear it is working well. Keep us up to date on your experiences and how it performs over the coming weeks!
Keith, yes just about a week from order to delivery. I think it was picked up from the UK supplier on the Wednesday, it was on the Isle of Man by the Saturday and on my drive the following Monday.