The Art of Laser Engraving: A DIY Kit Review and Experimentation

I recently had the opportunity to try out a DIY laser engraving kit, and I must say, it was a game-changer for me. As someone who's always been fascinated by the world of laser engraving, I was excited to finally get my hands on one and start experimenting with it. The kit arrived with all the necessary components, including the laser head, power supply, and engraving tool.

One of the first things I noticed when setting up the kit was that the laser head was burning past the silver layer on some of the substrates I used. This was a bit of a setback, but it also helped me to understand what needed to be done differently. By adjusting my settings and using the correct substrate, I was able to achieve much better results.

The DIY kit came with a few pre-designed logos and designs that I could use as test subjects. The first one I tried out was a logo on S100 and F1000 substrates. Unfortunately, the result wasn't exactly what I had in mind. The laser was capable of doing intricate details, but some of the finer lines were getting lost due to the substrate's limitations.

To overcome this issue, I decided to do further testing and experimentation. This led me to try out a different logo on a tech goodies sticker, which resulted in much better quality. The final test involved engraving onto an anodized aluminum piece with a black paint coating underneath. By flipping the piece over, I was able to etch directly off the design, leaving behind a clean and crisp image.

Throughout my experimentation process, I learned that metal substrates are challenging to work with, especially when it comes to stainless steel. The laser head simply couldn't cut through the metal effectively, resulting in uneven lines and poor quality. However, I discovered that by applying a special paint or spray, I could create a decal-like effect on the metal surface.

Another interesting discovery was that not all anodized aluminum pieces are created equal. Some had better-quality coatings than others, which affected the results of my tests. It's clear that more research and experimentation would be needed to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of this type of material.

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with the ease of use and quality of the DIY laser engraving kit. While there were some initial setbacks, the kit proved to be incredibly versatile and capable. With the right settings and substrates, it's possible to achieve stunning results that would rival professional-grade equipment.

For those interested in trying their hand at laser engraving, I highly recommend starting with a DIY kit like this one. Not only is it more affordable than buying a pre-made unit, but you also get the flexibility to upgrade and customize your own device. The kit came with all the necessary components, allowing me to get started right away.

One of the most exciting aspects of laser engraving is the potential for creativity and experimentation. With the right tools and materials, the possibilities are endless, from simple logos and designs to intricate artwork and even functional items. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a beginner like myself, a DIY laser engraving kit is an excellent way to get started on your creative journey.

In conclusion, my experience with the DIY laser engraving kit has been nothing short of amazing. From the ease of use to the quality of results, it's clear that this kit is a game-changer for anyone interested in exploring the world of laser engraving. I'm excited to continue experimenting and pushing the limits of what can be achieved with this technology.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody this is Carl from techable goodies and on my desk here I have the algo laser DIY kit 5 wat laser engraver okay so this barely fits on my desk but I'll do my best to kind of show some b-roll some extra video to so that you can actually see what the device is and how it works so as I mentioned this is a laser engraver okay so this is my first fora into laser engraving and what I found is there is a bit of a learning curve right there's different materials there's different lasers there's different things you can do based on what laser you have and what material you have this one here specifically is a 5 watt Laser Now lasers can go up to a much higher wattage and those are usually for cutting um less for Engraving this particular model comes in a 2 watt a 5 Watt and a 10 Watt and like I said I have the 5 watt here so the 5 watt is actually capable of Engraving a lot of different things and I have some examples here kind of show you the progression I went through in order to learn how to use it the setup and assembly to this was was pretty straightforward but also was a little bit difficult for me and my son because we managed to put it together wrong three different times so we kind of had to take pieces apart put them back together because the way these outer bars are set up they have to be in a very specific orientation so that the power pack will fit on as well as the laser unit and the Glide itself so this middle part here Glides along in order to sort of move the laser and then the laser moves back and forth if you have a any sort of 3D printer that you've used it's a very similar concept but the software controls everything about this and the software that I'm using is called laser Geral it's laser grbl and that's a free software that allows you to be able to load in images and it will convert it to the instructions that are necessary for this lasers or machine to work so if you end up buying this particular unit it will come with one piece of wood right so this piece of wood right here is what I ended up getting and we'll go into a little bit of what I was able to do with that and what I was able to test with that but so I also went ahead and bought a piece of anodized aluminum so that I could go ahead and try to print on that I bought some patches that go onto hats uh leather patches I bought a phone case um and just tried a couple different things so this isn't going to be much of a tutorial on how to use the device because that would just be an hour long an algo laser already has a bunch of really good tutorials that you can follow if you decide to purchase this machine and I'll leave the link down below so you can check it out if you're ever considering getting into laser engraving so the first thing that I ended up doing was printing this okay so this is the wood that I ended up getting with the device itself okay now one of the things that I found was that I was so new to this that I didn't particularly know what I was doing I just left it at the base settings and what that did was that it tended to maybe burn or overburn in some areas so what is common practice is for you to be able to go ahead and print out a laser and power test grid so that you'll know exactly what power setting and speed setting to use for the material that you're doing so I went ahead and printed that on the back here okay so what you can see and I'll hold this up close is that there's a whole range and and one of the good things about this particular laser printer is that it will do uh really nice gradients okay so if you have like an actual photo that you want to print on something it'll do that quite well and you can kind of see that here with all the different powers because what you do is when you set it up you set okay I want the minimum power to be zero and the maximum power to be a th000 so that will allow the laser to go up to a th000 for the darkest of darks and then also to zero or 10% just for those fine gradients so if you look here on the left side you have some numbers those are your F numbers so F 1000 all the way to F 4,000 and F uh is the number that you put I believe into the speed or how fast the laser will move and then across the bottom here you have the power so those are your s numbers and so this is a power versus speed grid so if I would have looked at this I would have known that maybe I want to go ahead and do this one right here and it's so small I want to see so that's S100 and f1000 I think I had it at s1000 which is all the way up here and f1000 so when I did this print you can see that they're definitely is some over printing now the thing I noticed about laser engraving is that it does give kind of a texture it's not just drawing on top of this it's actually burning away the wood so this turned out pretty nice and I was pretty happy with this so then what I did was I went ahead and graduated to some other things I decided I was going to go ahead and buy a phone case for my phone I'll show you a quick image of that and what I did was print my logo on there again this was before I knew about the speed test it turned out really well but I would have liked to adjust exactly how deep or how strong that ended up being as well as you know work with the size one of the things that I find difficult and you can remedy this but what I find difficult is lining up the substrate that you're printing on so that you don't have an angled image right you can line it up with the sides here but if it's a smaller item like some patches that I was doing you'll see that it is a little bit difficult to get that lined up correctly you can buy additional under plates for protection in case the laser goes through which I had it do I had it too strong on one of the patch and it actually just burns straight through into the table below if you're going to use something like this make sure you use it in a well ventilated area I have it downstairs in on my first floor right next to a window with a fan and blows everything out the window so the fumes can be toxic depending on what you're doing I also tried it on another case that I had I'll show you it here so I tried to do it on this one and you can see that it did work but what it ended up doing was just melting the plastic away and then so there was some Splash over from the plas plastic and because this is a plastic item all the way through you're not going to get any sort of dark black you'll just see the embossed look on the surface itself so then like I said I went ahead and bought some patches here's an example of that so this is kind of a a patch and you can see that there is a bit of overburn and it is angled because I I just didn't do it correctly um if I would have done a test on this like I did here so let me show you another example of what I did with patches um you can see that I went ahead and bought these black patches now the way these work is that right below the surface there is a silver layer so if you burn away the top layer you end up seeing the silver show through if you look at the power test that I did here you can see that over here in this area you're just not getting any sort of visual on the product itself because it's burning past that silver layer and down so what I found was that if I did this one right here which was like S100 and uh f1000 that it would work perfect okay so then doing this test really helped with that so here's the result of what I ended up doing so first I kind of did the logo on there and you can see it's a little a skew from what I wanted it to be and the laser is really capable of doing a lot of intricate detail but on the substrate that I have here or the product that I have here you can see that some of those details are too fine and they end up getting lost so my final test was this one right here so this is kind of like a tech goodies logo that I put on here and I used the correct settings and it came out beautifully so I'm super happy with what I've come up with over time the one thing that we did try to do was go ahead and engrave onto metal now if you're trying to do stainless steel or anything like that it's actually just not going to work because in in my mind I think to myself okay it's going to burn a nice dark black thing onto a piece of metal but it doesn't it just kind of it's just the Metal's too strong for that and what we found out is that you can actually buy a product that is like a spray paint or a white paint that you put onto the metal and that will go ahead and burn onto the metal become sort of a decal on the metal itself and while that works pretty good I found that you can kind of wipe it off so depending on what the quality of that substances that you put on there you can emboss metal uh but it might not have a good amount of longevity depending on what surface it's on and what paint you use so the last thing I kind of wanted to show you which I really really like was the that I picked up this piece of black metal the way that it works is that it's an anodized aluminum it has a black paint over the aluminum underneath so if I flip it over you'll see that I was able to go ahead and etch directly off so what it does is it gets rid of the black paint and leaves behind whatever logo or whatever design you put on there if you look closely you can see that some of the areas you know aren't as clean as they should be and that's just simply because I also did not do a speed test this was before I got into the speed tests and the power tests so fortunately it ended up working but I think that if I would have done a test on the back just to see exactly what the right settings were I probably would have got a better result but I can't complain about this I absolutely love it in fact I'm going to go ahead and put it back over here and that looks pretty nice of course I've got a little bit of the blur on my camera but it looks pretty nice back there but overall I've always wanted to get into laser engraving but I didn't know what to do right so really the only thing you can do is if you really want to do this is just to pick one up but with a DIY kit like this if you purchase it you were able to go ahead and upgrade it so the way they have this work is that it is a DIY kit so you put it all together then you can add things to it you can add a blower to it you can add the bottom plate to it you can upgrade the laser you can do all sorts of stuff so it's kind of like that first step into laser engraving and again you know I think that in general a lot of my experiments ended up like absolute crap because I didn't know what I was doing but a lot of them ended up really nicely and I'm looking forward to just continuing to use this thanks to them for sending this over so that I could try it out share it with you give my experience give my thoughts but overall with the unit the ease of using it I'm super impressed I hope you like this video I hope it helped you out if so give me a thumbs up I always appreciate it subscribe I'd love to see you back but until next time this is Carl from techville goodies and I'm outwhat's up everybody this is Carl from techable goodies and on my desk here I have the algo laser DIY kit 5 wat laser engraver okay so this barely fits on my desk but I'll do my best to kind of show some b-roll some extra video to so that you can actually see what the device is and how it works so as I mentioned this is a laser engraver okay so this is my first fora into laser engraving and what I found is there is a bit of a learning curve right there's different materials there's different lasers there's different things you can do based on what laser you have and what material you have this one here specifically is a 5 watt Laser Now lasers can go up to a much higher wattage and those are usually for cutting um less for Engraving this particular model comes in a 2 watt a 5 Watt and a 10 Watt and like I said I have the 5 watt here so the 5 watt is actually capable of Engraving a lot of different things and I have some examples here kind of show you the progression I went through in order to learn how to use it the setup and assembly to this was was pretty straightforward but also was a little bit difficult for me and my son because we managed to put it together wrong three different times so we kind of had to take pieces apart put them back together because the way these outer bars are set up they have to be in a very specific orientation so that the power pack will fit on as well as the laser unit and the Glide itself so this middle part here Glides along in order to sort of move the laser and then the laser moves back and forth if you have a any sort of 3D printer that you've used it's a very similar concept but the software controls everything about this and the software that I'm using is called laser Geral it's laser grbl and that's a free software that allows you to be able to load in images and it will convert it to the instructions that are necessary for this lasers or machine to work so if you end up buying this particular unit it will come with one piece of wood right so this piece of wood right here is what I ended up getting and we'll go into a little bit of what I was able to do with that and what I was able to test with that but so I also went ahead and bought a piece of anodized aluminum so that I could go ahead and try to print on that I bought some patches that go onto hats uh leather patches I bought a phone case um and just tried a couple different things so this isn't going to be much of a tutorial on how to use the device because that would just be an hour long an algo laser already has a bunch of really good tutorials that you can follow if you decide to purchase this machine and I'll leave the link down below so you can check it out if you're ever considering getting into laser engraving so the first thing that I ended up doing was printing this okay so this is the wood that I ended up getting with the device itself okay now one of the things that I found was that I was so new to this that I didn't particularly know what I was doing I just left it at the base settings and what that did was that it tended to maybe burn or overburn in some areas so what is common practice is for you to be able to go ahead and print out a laser and power test grid so that you'll know exactly what power setting and speed setting to use for the material that you're doing so I went ahead and printed that on the back here okay so what you can see and I'll hold this up close is that there's a whole range and and one of the good things about this particular laser printer is that it will do uh really nice gradients okay so if you have like an actual photo that you want to print on something it'll do that quite well and you can kind of see that here with all the different powers because what you do is when you set it up you set okay I want the minimum power to be zero and the maximum power to be a th000 so that will allow the laser to go up to a th000 for the darkest of darks and then also to zero or 10% just for those fine gradients so if you look here on the left side you have some numbers those are your F numbers so F 1000 all the way to F 4,000 and F uh is the number that you put I believe into the speed or how fast the laser will move and then across the bottom here you have the power so those are your s numbers and so this is a power versus speed grid so if I would have looked at this I would have known that maybe I want to go ahead and do this one right here and it's so small I want to see so that's S100 and f1000 I think I had it at s1000 which is all the way up here and f1000 so when I did this print you can see that they're definitely is some over printing now the thing I noticed about laser engraving is that it does give kind of a texture it's not just drawing on top of this it's actually burning away the wood so this turned out pretty nice and I was pretty happy with this so then what I did was I went ahead and graduated to some other things I decided I was going to go ahead and buy a phone case for my phone I'll show you a quick image of that and what I did was print my logo on there again this was before I knew about the speed test it turned out really well but I would have liked to adjust exactly how deep or how strong that ended up being as well as you know work with the size one of the things that I find difficult and you can remedy this but what I find difficult is lining up the substrate that you're printing on so that you don't have an angled image right you can line it up with the sides here but if it's a smaller item like some patches that I was doing you'll see that it is a little bit difficult to get that lined up correctly you can buy additional under plates for protection in case the laser goes through which I had it do I had it too strong on one of the patch and it actually just burns straight through into the table below if you're going to use something like this make sure you use it in a well ventilated area I have it downstairs in on my first floor right next to a window with a fan and blows everything out the window so the fumes can be toxic depending on what you're doing I also tried it on another case that I had I'll show you it here so I tried to do it on this one and you can see that it did work but what it ended up doing was just melting the plastic away and then so there was some Splash over from the plas plastic and because this is a plastic item all the way through you're not going to get any sort of dark black you'll just see the embossed look on the surface itself so then like I said I went ahead and bought some patches here's an example of that so this is kind of a a patch and you can see that there is a bit of overburn and it is angled because I I just didn't do it correctly um if I would have done a test on this like I did here so let me show you another example of what I did with patches um you can see that I went ahead and bought these black patches now the way these work is that right below the surface there is a silver layer so if you burn away the top layer you end up seeing the silver show through if you look at the power test that I did here you can see that over here in this area you're just not getting any sort of visual on the product itself because it's burning past that silver layer and down so what I found was that if I did this one right here which was like S100 and uh f1000 that it would work perfect okay so then doing this test really helped with that so here's the result of what I ended up doing so first I kind of did the logo on there and you can see it's a little a skew from what I wanted it to be and the laser is really capable of doing a lot of intricate detail but on the substrate that I have here or the product that I have here you can see that some of those details are too fine and they end up getting lost so my final test was this one right here so this is kind of like a tech goodies logo that I put on here and I used the correct settings and it came out beautifully so I'm super happy with what I've come up with over time the one thing that we did try to do was go ahead and engrave onto metal now if you're trying to do stainless steel or anything like that it's actually just not going to work because in in my mind I think to myself okay it's going to burn a nice dark black thing onto a piece of metal but it doesn't it just kind of it's just the Metal's too strong for that and what we found out is that you can actually buy a product that is like a spray paint or a white paint that you put onto the metal and that will go ahead and burn onto the metal become sort of a decal on the metal itself and while that works pretty good I found that you can kind of wipe it off so depending on what the quality of that substances that you put on there you can emboss metal uh but it might not have a good amount of longevity depending on what surface it's on and what paint you use so the last thing I kind of wanted to show you which I really really like was the that I picked up this piece of black metal the way that it works is that it's an anodized aluminum it has a black paint over the aluminum underneath so if I flip it over you'll see that I was able to go ahead and etch directly off so what it does is it gets rid of the black paint and leaves behind whatever logo or whatever design you put on there if you look closely you can see that some of the areas you know aren't as clean as they should be and that's just simply because I also did not do a speed test this was before I got into the speed tests and the power tests so fortunately it ended up working but I think that if I would have done a test on the back just to see exactly what the right settings were I probably would have got a better result but I can't complain about this I absolutely love it in fact I'm going to go ahead and put it back over here and that looks pretty nice of course I've got a little bit of the blur on my camera but it looks pretty nice back there but overall I've always wanted to get into laser engraving but I didn't know what to do right so really the only thing you can do is if you really want to do this is just to pick one up but with a DIY kit like this if you purchase it you were able to go ahead and upgrade it so the way they have this work is that it is a DIY kit so you put it all together then you can add things to it you can add a blower to it you can add the bottom plate to it you can upgrade the laser you can do all sorts of stuff so it's kind of like that first step into laser engraving and again you know I think that in general a lot of my experiments ended up like absolute crap because I didn't know what I was doing but a lot of them ended up really nicely and I'm looking forward to just continuing to use this thanks to them for sending this over so that I could try it out share it with you give my experience give my thoughts but overall with the unit the ease of using it I'm super impressed I hope you like this video I hope it helped you out if so give me a thumbs up I always appreciate it subscribe I'd love to see you back but until next time this is Carl from techville goodies and I'm out