Newbie here looking for advice

[Paul Phillips]

Jay, most lasers have an option for dual cutting heads which allows you to cut/engrave two parts simultaneously, and some (like mine) have an option for two laser cartridges, my reason was simply wanting increased power but there are other advantages to that as well, if you have the dual heads you can have more power per head instead of splitting the beam between both heads, the other one is the ULS "superspeed" feature which allows both beams to fire at the same time through a special lens that effectively doubles the engraving speed.

[Mike Null]

Jay

My Trotec is 45 watts and I use it mostly for laminated plastics, some wood and Cermark. I deal with mostly commercial accounts. Last week i did an acrylic sign job for a museum.

All things considered, my 45 is adequate but I'd prefer an 80 watt machine just for the added speed. I just had my tube re-manufactured after 8 years. Prior to that I had only one day of down time in that period.

The latest version of Job Control is the berries!

[Jay Selway]

Jay, most lasers have an option for dual cutting heads which allows you to cut/engrave two parts simultaneously, and some (like mine) have an option for two laser cartridges, my reason was simply wanting increased power but there are other advantages to that as well, if you have the dual heads you can have more power per head instead of splitting the beam between both heads, the other one is the ULS "superspeed" feature which allows both beams to fire at the same time through a special lens that effectively doubles the engraving speed.

Wow, that's cool.

Speed isn't a huge concern right now, mostly quality and start-up-newbie friendliness. Since I'm not going to be churning out a ton of products (like rubber stamps or coasters for example), I really just want something that will be easy-to-use, flexible (I want to do some pretty big artwork), detailed, and have great customer service.

That's why I keep coming back to Trotec and Epilog.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get a call back from Trotec. #fail.

[Mike Eastman]

Hey everyone,

I'm new here also. I've been using a Full Spectrum Laser for several years and am pretty happy with it. They are located in Las Vegas and the phone support for me has been superb. You may want to look at the following link to see what they have for less than 15K. It has a 51x36" work area and 2 90watt tubes. http://fslaser.com/products/lasers/m...-head-dual-two