Chinese lasers - they're here !!!

[Dan Hintz]

Rodney,

Google for "Windows Resource Editor"... that should get you some stand-alone programs that will let you edit DLLs. If you have Microsoft's Visual Studio I would suggest using that... you could try their free version, but I don't know if they have locked out resource editing in it or not.

[John Barton]

Well , after a little fiddling to get the lasers set up (I wanted to run 2 lasers off one computer and send the same file to either within the cutting software which is not as easy as just having one laser attached) I finally got both running as I wanted.

Software installation (I don't have the latest version but will soon be getting it and the hardware required to run it) is fairly straightforward but not as seamless as I would like , the manual in good chinglish is still not idiotproof (I am rewriting it to be so) and some steps are a little confusing or not explained in detail. All the relevant instructions are there , but some vital settings are not highlighted enough.

I have Corel 11 and X3 installed , I would not recommend 11 as I had a lot of issues trying to use it with their driver , X3 was a lot easier to getting the Corel plug in/vba thing to work.

I haven't fiddled much yet , but one of the things i was trying to do was to see what 4-5pt text looks like on this machine (on perspex) and initially I was getting very poor results , however after tweaking some settings (there are a zillion settings . not for the faint hearted , you can control this machine to the nth degree) and slowing down a little bit , I got exceptional results , far better then my GCC's output at that size , I have a 10x loupe and inspected with that as well as by eye. As can be expected , output of very fine detail at maximum speed is compromised , slowing things down helps , however larger text and solid items exhibit extremely good results. Inspecting a solid square , I was blown away with the smoothness and lack of banding , lines or ridges , the output on perspex when inspected under 10x was as good as sandblasting with the finest grit , one could just make out the lines of the laser scan , but this is under 10x magnification!!!!

I have yet to see how this machine copes with complex existing Corel files , the plugin seems to do conversion to an AI file on the fly and then uses that in the driver. I do foresee that I might have to make some adjustments to work flow , but that will be something
I will have to live with. I didn't expect 4x the machine at 1/4 of the price , compromises are a part of the deal.

There are still some small things I am discovering that need to be improved hardware wise , the machine has a small recessed panel in front with 4 large knob type power/emergency stop switches , one for the machine itself, one for the laser ,one for each of the blower and air pump .
They will need to be dumped and replaced with smaller easier to use switches as the recess is too crowded to operate em easily, no biggie. I spoke to the factory about this and they said when I have done mine to my satisfaction , that they will implement this in their new builds.

It must be said that the factory is extremely proactive in a lot of respects , mails are answered very promptly , Provisional invoices are issued as quotes , they will answer any technical query you have with your build in detail (They are on skype so you can get answers instantly)
Setup and technical issues once you have your machine are easily solved in real time and if you really run into problems the factory tech support will "invade" your puter and offer remote assistance. They are keenly following my suggestions for improvements to their machines. This kind of performance is what mainstream buyers want and expect.

The main issue with chinese machines is "trust" , trust you will get a decent product after paying (their terms are30% upfront and 70% when the machine is loaded) , trust you will get some support , trust that warrantees will be honoured , trust that the machines will do what it says on the label. So far , all my expectations on these have been met or exceeded.

I was quoted $350 for new mainboards and LCD panels to run the new software , my machine builds were completed before the new stuff was implemented so were not delivered with em. The factory is sending me 3 new mainboards , 3 new lcd panels and the new software via DHL , and have requested I send my older stuff back (3 cos I had also ordered a spare , 2 on my machines , 1 spare set). However all I have to do is pay shipping both ways , I think this is a very fair and equitable deal...

My overall impression so far is still that these machines are a total bargain , I cannot see what can possibly really give rise to hardware issues and even so , spares are a joke re pricing.

I was quoted around $20 000 for a 40W mainsteam machine with a 750x500 bed , I have got a machine with double the power, more than double the bed size at 1/4 of the price.
I am spending the next week , when time permits (It's a little hectic at work right now) putting the 2 machines thru their paces and will post pics of output and will detail the operational aspects and report on any bugs.

I have to say something abut Vincent De Klerk , who brought in a machine before me and who let me look at and test on his before buying mine.
He helped us commission our machine and set them up on the computer , he spent 3 mornings with us , forgoing his own business to do so.
His help was invaluable and demonstrates the thing I like so much about this forum and it's laser community , the willingness to help other , give back and share and the altruism that is plainly evident. Vincent , you are a STAR!!!!

Thank you to you and Vincent for your excellent research and follow-up. I live in China and IN CHINA it's next to impossible to find out the wealth of information contained on this forum about Chinese lasers. I own a Chinese generic laser and I wish that I had had the advantage of your experience before purchasing it. It is a decent enough workhorse but for the same money I would have much rather gone with a company that has already shown an ability to work closer to foreign standards of service and reliability. For me personally it would be nice to be able to talk to someone in support in english rather than have to go through translators and third parties (I suppose I could get off my lazy butt and learn Chinese).

Over here there are "laser" companies in every city, mostly resellers or partial assemblers all buying from the same sources. It's hard to find out which ones are good to work with. We bought factory direct but the best service has come from the brother of the factory owner who happens to be a distributor for the lasers in the province we live in. Without him we'd be lost sometimes. But without the Creekers I'd be hopelessly lost.

I do think that the Chinese machines often require a lot of tinkering but once set they seem to be pretty reliable. I have seen factories here that run theirs HARD day in and day out with them almost never going down. By the same token the cue making factory down the street opted for the ULS 660s for their cue engraving jobs and they run those almost 24 hours a day (only stopping for meals as no Chinese worker skips lunch).

Anyway, thank you again for this. What I am looking for now is whether it will be possible for us to get away from the Lasercut drivers and into something closer to what I had with the ULS drivers. Judging by your posts and other research it seems as if there might be a way for me to change controller cards and thus get the better drivers that come with that. Am I off base?

[Rodne Gold]

You can get a motherboard, lcd panel and the software and configure the rest of the machine to suit , you may have to do some rewiring to the stepper drivers or of the limit switches etc , not too difficult. the software will allow you to configure you axes to work correctly and your laser to fire at the right time and so on. Yeh, I know about the lunch thing - everything stops....

[Rodne Gold]

I have been playing a lot for the last few days and have had some great results and learnt a lot.

I was playing mainly on the "cheaper" 900 x600 glass tubed 60w machine - supposedly the less able of the 2 machines I have but comments etc apply to both machines. I have a spare 80w Reci tube and associated power supply and am thinking of putting it in the cheaper glass tubed machine , its a snap to do... I'll wait till my glass tube gives up the ghost tho.

The engraving , after fine tuning the bidirectional settings is STUNNING... the driver has a backlash compensation for various speeds , by engraving a thin font or line you can get the start and end points of succesive scan lines to line up almost perfectly under 10x magnification.
Text that is unreadble by eye is pretty good at 10x magnification. Even at the maximum practical speed of this machine which is 20" per second , the output is great. However running at 20" per second take 2x longer than 10" per second if engraving small objects , the reason is that it uses a lot more space either side of the small object to accelerate and decellerate , undoubtedly on a long "run" (IE a long run from left to right) the higher speed comes into its own.

Cycle times were on average 2/3rd to 1/2 the time on my spirits at 100% speed at 250 and 500 dpi. The engraving of the chinese machine at max speeds was actually a lot better than the spirits.. I was testing using 1.2mm Arial upper case letters (1/20th of an inch lettering) , barely readable.

I have also tried the kerf width compensation and it works really well , after calibrating the laser in terms of the X and Y travelling the same distance , I cut a 4" x 4" square using the kerf compensation and it was about 0.008" out!!!!

There are some huge advantages to this driver over my current machines , I can set cut ordering exceptionally well and very easily , I can set cut start points where I like and cut directions as I wish , Or I can let the excellent machine optimization do it all for me....
Can delete overlaps or multiple lines as well...so you can stack up rectangles with coincident sides and the machine wont "double cut". Shortens times a lot.

We were cutting small discs out of 1.5mm rowmark material , just under an inch in diameter and at the highest speed we could achieve with the power we have. the issue was there was a small notch at the start and end points , due to the lasers "piercing" at that point , the driver allows both a lead in and lead out , IE it can start the cut outside the circle ,cut the circle and finish outside , all automagically , we got absolutely perfect circles.

Registration on this machine is a snap , the options you have in respect of positioning are bewilderingly manifold. There really isnt a situation where you cant make a plan for perfect registration.

Alignment of graphics is also infinitely configurable , apart from alignment on the page and alignment to each other , you can force any graphic or element to equal the height or width of another or force em to be the exact same size. Not sure where this useful tho.. they wouldn't have put it in if there wasnt some use for that...

You can also do a manual cut if you so wish , there is a virtual control panel that allows you to jog the head , either with the laser firing or not , you can set the jog distance , the jog speed and the power you want. Great for "cutting off" unused materal or making a slot in a wood base etc.

There is a special scanning mode which will allow deep engraving or bass relief letters to be done with a very flat and smooth background , you can modulate the spot size etc , but this shortens power supply and tube life , so I have not used it.

There is a stamp mode , Ramp is used to make shoulders , havent used that either.

One feature which is also great is you can download the files to the laser or use a usb flash disk to store the engraving files (with all the settings etc) and run the laser as a stand alone , one could have banks of these all doing one job and not have to have a computer at all...The laser keeps all the downloaded files in memory even when off.

As to pause , you can pause the machine , jog the head away from the engraving,, inspect it and then press start and it goes back to where is was and finishes. One good thing is that if you press pause , it stops immediately , my spirits want to finish the particular curve or line its on when pressing pause. Even better is that if you kill the power or it goes off midway thru a job , when the laser reboots , it asks you whether you want to complete the job a nd goes and completes it if you say yes.

As a design package , RDcam (or laserworks) sucks big time , it's pretty primitive , useful for simple stuff but nothing much else.

Whats nice is the combine curve , often DXF files and others come in in segments , the program/driver allows you to combine these into single curves and/or force the curve to close.

You also have an option to cut a square around any graphic with whatever white space you want.

Another option is to engrave (scan) and then cut (vector engrave) the outline of the object afterwards , great for cleaning up letters edges or die cutting. No provision for using an offset when doing so , it would have been nice to be able to cut with a "border" , but no go.

Selection of objects is often an issue , you can explicitly group objects , but right clicking on a colour in the layer panel selects all objects of that colour, otherwise you have to pick and shift or marquee select. Not the most elegant thing in the world.
Screen resolution of the grahics are a little "gross" , not as fine and smoothe as Corel.

There is a great option called small circle diameter , it allows you to drop cutting speed for small objects under a user setable diameter , so you can get the best quality and have the best of both worlds , high speed for big stuff , slow for smaller...

We have tried various materials on both machines , the practical maximum in terms of acrylic is 12.5mm (1/2") and output is not that great , 8mm and bleow is a snap. Formica (countertop material) cuts at great speed , 1/4" mdf is ok , a little bit of charring but not too bad. the rowmark/ipi plastics are easily processed.

The machine itself is VERY simple , troubleshooting is easy - we had the 60w machine go out and within 5 minutes had discovered the laser power supply had popped a fuse , the reason is that we had the machine on a dirty line and when other heavy stuff kicked in , we had droops and surges..now on its own dedicated "clean" line , 5 mins later the PS was both in and out and repaired and we were up and running again.

Once again , I have to stress that the online tech support is really exceptional , the tech guy is available on skype and if hes not in office , they will call him , I have never waited more than a few hours (cos of time differences) for an answer to any small query..

I cannot comment on long term reliabilty , but cant see much that can really go wrong , I have spares galore at any rate.
My operators are fighting to use the 2 machines , albeit slower than the spirits for engraving , the cutting ability of the higher power tubes is actually reducing thruput times on a lot of jobs.

The more I use my machines , the more I am determined to replace and add to my existing stuff , Im looking at a 1500mm x 1300mm twin tube/twin head machine with 2x reci 100w tubes. I can either do 2 750x1300 sized pieces simultaneously , or easily remove th one head and use the full 1300 x 1500 table , should be a great cutting/larger engraving workhorse , even if one tube goes out , there is still another!!

Proposed cost of this machine is round $8000 with all the bells and whistels , all the top quality options and spare everything!!

In the next day or so , I will be doing comparative engraving and some torture tests and will post pics of the results.

As an aside , on the china quality issue , I sell a huge amount of medals with customised domed inserts and was thinking of moving from local to Chinese production , my agents took random samples off a production line and sent them to me , at the pricing I was expecting junk , a 50mm medal iweighing an once and a bit is priced at 20c and a 70mm medal is priced at 35c ....
Well, myself and my staff were stunned , the quality is exceptional , plating is very very good and the medals look like thay should cost 10x more. Chunky , with heft and weight and extremely well defined stamping/die casting , each wrapped in tissue paper and bagged in a ziplok.
I had initally considered an order of 30 000 in total but have doubled that now. Weight of the medals is just over 5000 lbs !!!!
I can offer my clients a medal that is at least 3x better and bigger than I have ever produced here at the same price they paid last year..

[Ken Shea]

Rodney,
An Interesting write.

I believe I have read all the threads in this post but do not recall seeing where you mentioned the controller or driver you are referring to?

Ken

[Rodne Gold]

Hiya Ken , it's called Rdcam or laserworks and it comes with the machines , I think its written by shenui lasers or adapted by them for a Leetro motherboard , you can find a manual for an older version here
http://www.jinlantrade.com/ebay/sh35...350dmanual.pdf
Its pretty chinglish and the older versions miss a few things the new software has.

[Ken Shea]

Thanks Rodne
Guess you had mentioned it

looks to be superior to the typical.

[Bruce Dorworth]

Rodne is there a place on to specify steps for the rotary attachment? I entered my steps for x axis and y axis, but when my rotary is plugged in it seems to turn to far.

Bruce

[Rodne Gold]

I have2 different rotaries with my lasers , havent tried them yet , the driver has place for diameter and another that they call "circle pulse" which is how many pulses/steps is needed to complete one full revolution , their default is 1000??
This is from their manual ,rather uninteligble...chinglish at it's worst......

4.9.2Rotate Engraving


【Enable rotate engrave】：After enable engraving，the actual precision of Y-axis will be based on diameter and step per rotate to auto match the setting of pulse precision ofY-axis. In addition, the work area in the main interface will also change.

【Diameter】：The diameter size of the parts.

【Step per rotate】：The numberof pulse corresponds to the workpiece rotate one week.

The function is to facilitate the users to replace parts, and different size of the workpiece when the workpiece is not very different before use. When the relatively large difference in size of the workpiece, it is recommended to use directly modify the motor step approach to implementation.

Rotary engraving is only when usingthe rotation axis to replace the Y-axis use.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what that all means

[George M. Perzel]

Rodne;
Wow! Now I'm glad I didn't order the rotaries!!
Best Regards;
George
Laserarts

[Dan Hintz]

I have2 different rotaries with my lasers , havent tried them yet , the driver has place for diameter and another that they call "circle pulse" which is how many pulses/steps is needed to complete one full revolution , their default is 1000??
This is from their manual ,rather uninteligble...chinglish at it's worst......

4.9.2Rotate Engraving


【Enable rotate engrave】：After enable engraving，the actual precision of Y-axis will be based on diameter and step per rotate to auto match the setting of pulse precision ofY-axis. In addition, the work area in the main interface will also change.

【Diameter】：The diameter size of the parts.

【Step per rotate】：The numberof pulse corresponds to the workpiece rotate one week.

The function is to facilitate the users to replace parts, and different size of the workpiece when the workpiece is not very different before use. When the relatively large difference in size of the workpiece, it is recommended to use directly modify the motor step approach to implementation.

Rotary engraving is only when usingthe rotation axis to replace the Y-axis use.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what that all means

Doesn't seem too bad there,Rodney...
"Diameter": Diameter of the part being engraved
"Step per rotate": Number of pulses for one complete revolution (interesting how their translators get "week" from revolution, ain't it?)
"Enable rotate engrave": The last part is the most odd... it appears the work area in the GUI will change based upon the circumference of the engraved item (like changing the page size in Corel)

If that was the worst of the Chinglish, I'd be happy...

[Rodne Gold]

Well, i would imagine pulses per revolution is fixed for one of my rotary attachements as that one is a lathe type thing . the other has rollers and the rollers roll the item , so there things might vary as there can be a "gearing" effect if the diameter of the object is bigger or smaller than the roller
I doubt the machine can sense which rotary is being used. I actually don't even know where to plug the things in , just unpacked the rotaries and stuck em away , they come with NO documentation. The GUI does not change at all if you enable rotary engraving , however there is a "test" button you can press when you enter the diameter and pulse thing (obviously to see how much it rotates)
When you look at a simulation screen , it does change when you enable rotary , so you and more or less see what you getting. Im sure one would have to change the page size manually to the actual engraving area for positioning and so on.

I think this will need quite a bit of fiddling to see how it actually works in real life. I hardly use rotaries anyway , so they were just an afterthought when buying the machines , both were about $350 combined so my thinking was at that price , I might as well get em.
I might give one a bash today and see what it does... Maybe there IS some further documentation to em ..will ask my supplier..

[Ian Franks]

Rodney
Thank for the link http://www.jinlantrade.com/ebay/sh350dlaserengraver/sh350dmanual.pdf this matches our panel on the laser and is much better than what we got with our machine.

[stan kern]

Rodne
i have a similar machine 100 watt with the same cooler (chiller as you) I have had this machine for about 1 1/2 yrs and no real problems.
The key on off lockeable switch fell apart and the computer stopped recognizing the laser but both items should be repaired shortly,
They are well built as you said well packed .
I used antifreeze in the chiller unit 1/2 1/2

[Rodne Gold]

We also using antifreeze , yellow for the one tube and pink for the other , looks cool when the tube fires and it glows yellow or pink ....