So I got this real deal on a Gopro 12 and I’m thinking of using it to make content for this place but here’s the thing, I only have a limited amount of storage space here. A lot of space, really, but these videos can run many hundreds of megabytes in size so it doesn’t take long to suck up a lot of storage space. So I’m experimenting with uploading them to my Youtube account and then just linking to the video from here instead of storing them here. I tried this once before with some other incredibly boring stuff that was almost as mind numbingly dull as these new ones are, like this one of me
So here we go. If all goes well, this should be a video of a cat being petted.
That’s Marvelous Mercy the Wonder Cat. She’s about 13 years old and was a shelter kitty. She got adopted once, then the brought her back to the shelter for some reason. Then my youngest son adopted her. But she didn’t get along with his other kitty. She got along pretty well with our other cat and here we are. She was very shy and nervous at first but she’s turned into an absolute sweety.
Now this should be a video of this silly and ridiculously complicated marble run thing I just finished building a couple of weeks ago.
Finally I stuck the Gopro inside of the Vision laser and got this. The fun stuff doesn’t start to happen until about 1 minute into it.
When it’s actually cutting it looks like a blowtorch for heaven’s sake. I’d never seen what it looks like underneath the workpiece before. No wonder they tell you to never, ever, leave a laser engraver/cutter running unattended!
Well darn, this seems to actually work. So maybe you’ll have some more incredibly tedious, boring, mind numbingly dull videos to look forward to in the future! I even got a mount for the bike. Ooo, just think! The possibility of hours and hours of videos of nothing but endless miles of backroads while you start yawning and falling asleep at the computer! Ooo, the excitement!
I’m not really a fan of pro sports in general and my interest in the Milwaukee Bucks is little more than that of someone who likes to see the home team be successful. But even a casual fan like me has to start wondering what the feck is going on here.
They fired Budenholzer in 2023 after establishing a record that could only be described as bloody amazing and which included 5 trips to the playoffs and a championship in 2021, and a record of 271 wins vs. 120 losses. And his reward for that was being fired? After one year with Griffin as coach, they hired Doc Rivers with great fanfare for -for “reasons”? And since he came on board, well the Milwaukee Bucks have turned into an absolute mess.
I don’t know what kind of back office politics or other BS is going on down there in Milwaukee but it’s got to stop. It’s gotten to the point where fans can’t even be bothered to boo them any more, they just get up and leave at the start of the 4th quarter to beat the traffic home.
AI Stuff
I am getting sick and tired of all of this AI BS and I suspect you are as well. The thing with all of this is that so far we’ve had investors sink hundreds of billions of dollars into the development of the software and the building of massive data processing centers, and what are we getting in return? Not much, it seems. According to a study done by Goldman Sachs that just came out AI added exactly zero value to the GDP last year. So far it seems that about the only thing AI seems good for is cranking out deep fake images, political propaganda, the flooding of social media with extremist garbage, faked photos of celebrities having sex, and child exploitation material. And now we’re hearing of mentally fragile individuals being led into actual real psychosis and even suicide from their interactions with these things.
One of the biggest problems with AI is that because of how corrupt our political system is, there is virtually no regulation of this crap at all. None. The billionaire tech bros who are behind a lot of the development of these systems have so thoroughly corrupted our political system with what amounts to legalized bribery that they seem to be completely immune from prosecution for even the most flagrant abuses being committed by their shiny new toys. Even when they are held accountable, it is the company, not the individuals actually responsible, who end up being penalized. If ordinary individuals were responsible for some of the abuses taking place, they would be locked up. We have several cases in the courts here in Wisconsin right now of people being held accountable for producing indecent images of children or deep fake images of others through the use of these AI systems. But the people who make the tools that allow this to happen? Nothing.
We need to have the actual people behind these abusive systems held accountable. The boards of directors, the CEOs, the officers of the companies, and yes, the owners as well, need to be held personally liable for the abuses being committed by the resources they create and control. If you or I created an app that permitted someone to make child sexual abuse images or deep fakes of real people in the nude or engaging in sexual activities, we’d be in jail, not laying out the specifications for our latest mega yacht.
Journaling
When the dickens did what we used to call “keeping a diary” turn into “journaling”? And what is the difference between a diary and a journal anyway? Oh, sure, if you want to be pedantic about it the exact definitions of the words are different. A diary is supposedly little more than a list of the events that take place in your life while a journal is supposed to be more thoughtful and full of ideas and observations. But come on, in the real world? Has anyone who has ever kept a diary ever refrained from jotting down things that technically should have gone in a journal, or vice versa?l
I suspect it turned into “journaling” simply because it sounded more, oh, more pretentious. Keeping a diary is something an adolescent girl does. Journaling is something posh people do.
And I’m as pretentious as the next person so yes, I do “journaling”. And because I’m a firm believer in the old adage, “anything worth doing is worth doing to excess” I’ve turned it into a full blown affectation. I get these leather bound volumes with archival quality paper, each engraved with “Name’s Little Book Of Stupid Shit Volume xx”. And I use what is allegedly the best pencil made, the Blackwing Palomino 602. I do that because I have a reputation of being “eccentric” to maintain.
And imagine the surprise of anyone who ever reads one after I’m dead and discovers they are completely filled with utter drivel. Bad sketches of cartoons I’m working on for some project, project ideas, bad jokes and even worse puns that might eventually get worked into something useful for some of the promotional stuff I crank out, random observations about utterly trivial nonsense and outright lies.
Yes, I said outright lies. Hey, here’s the thing. Write a journal. But remember no one said you had to tell the truth, now did they? Your life, like mine, is probably mind numbingly boring. I mean let’s face it, for most of us the most exciting thing in our lives is the weekly trip to the grocery store, or if you’re like me, its getting up early on Friday mornings to watch the garbage truck come through with its automated can picker.
(I wish I was joking about that last part. I really do.)
So you’re going to do what? Write about that? Hell no! Just make shit up! Tell about the time you rode on the back of a Harley with Elvis to go to the New York World’s fair in 1964. Wax poetic about your memories of the year you spent in the south of France. Sure, you’ve never even been out of the state but your great grandkids won’t know that, now will they?
There, I feel better now. Now back to fiddling with wood and lasers and stuff…
So I went and did something I promised myself I wouldn’t do again, I got a video camera. Yes, I could use my iPhone to take videos but using a very expensive phone to make videos in situations where it could be easily dropped into rivers, mud holes and trails while biking, or inside of laser engravers, etc. did not seem like a good idea to me so when a GoPro turned up for sale at a huge discount, I bought the thing.
I suspect this is going to be one of those situations where “well it seemed like a good idea at the time” comes to mind when I find it covered in dust on a shelf after not using it for months. That’s what happened to the last video camera I had.
Anyway, there is an excellent chance you will be inflicted with videos in the future, so allow me to apologize in advance. Videos like, well, this one below which is not only the first video I took with the thing but also illustrates my latest project.
That is made from a kit called a “Marble Run”, the Spaceport edition. And it is without a doubt the most ridiculously complicated thing I’ve ever put together. I didn’t keep track of how many hours I have invested in building that thing, but it was a lot. Handling hundreds of parts, many of them so small I needed to use a needle nose pliers to put them in place and chasing tiny, tiny parts across the floor when they went flying were par for the course. And whoever engineered this thing is absolutely, positively, a bloody genius. The engineering and creativity behind designing and making something like this almost entirely out of nothing but wood and a few pins and a couple of screws, is mind boggling.
It’s difficult to envision just how complicated this thing is from that video so here’s a more detailed photo.
I mean just look at that thing. Trying to put all that together was bad enough, but can you imagine trying to design something like that from scratch? There are close to 500 individual pieces, most come in sheets of laser cut plywood of varying thicknesses.
And there is another one of these that is just as complicated waiting for me that eventually will be joined up with this one, along with third kit that is a motor drive and lighting system to drive both of them.
I don’t recommend a lot of products here, but this is one I would definitely recommend if you’re into building kits or 3D puzzles. It’s from a company called Rokr that makes a variety of these marble run type kits/puzzles for adults that range in price from about $30 on up to well over $100 depending on size and complexity.
The instruction/assembly manual is very well written but some caution is necessary because some of the illustrations can be a bit confusing. It’s generally broken down into subassemblies that are then connected together or to the main mounting board which makes it easier. It comes with everything you need, including any tools that are necessary. It includes sandpaper for smoothing off edges, wax for lubricating the gears and friction points, screwdrivers, etc. I would strongly urge you to also have on hand a small needle nose pliers for working with small parts especially if you have big, fumbly fingers like mine. And keep a bottle of instant glue with accelerant handy as well. If you are careful you won’t need the glue, but me? I managed to break a couple of small parts. I’d also recommend some very good lights as well.
Even more impressive was the thing actually worked after I got it together. I needed to do a bit of adjusting and in some cases some trimming to get everything to work smoothly. But having something this complicated actually work when I was done with it should give you an idea of how well the instructions are written.
And while I’m talking about videos, how about a kitty? Sure, why not.
That’s Marvelous Mercy The Wonder Cat and yes, you have to use her entire name when you call her or she will ignore you. She is a real sweety. She is considered a “senior” cat although you couldn’t tell it from looking at her. She’s about as sleek and athletic as they come.
If I do start doing more videos, there is the question of storage space. While WordPress gives me a more than generous amount of storage space here, these videos take up a huge amount of space so I suspect that what I’ll end up doing is uploading them to my Youtube account and just linking to them from here.
Well if I ever get around to it. If I start to do video stuff it means I’m going to have to learn how to use editing software. Ick…
Let’s see, what else? Oh. I made a clock! Well, several of them, actually.
MrsGF likes that one up there so much that it’s now hanging over the fireplace in the living room. Here’s another one that I did the other week that MrsGF has hanging up in her office.
I’m really surprised people don’t make more of these. They’re easy to make and cheap? You can make them out of any scraps of wood you have laying around, and these battery operated clock modules are ridiculously cheap. I picked up a box of 15 of them, complete with an assortment of hands, for $27. That’s about $1.80 each.
And I’ve run out of things to talk about for the moment. Aren’t you glad?
Coming up in the future: I’m putting together a list of on-line resources for craftspersons who dabble with laser engravers/cutters. That’s one of the most frequent requests I get. So I’m putting together a list of websites for things like free images, .SVG and other files you can use for cutting or engraving, resources for finding materials at decent prices, etc. So keep an eye out for that sometime in the next few weeks.
(Sidenote: It’s Feb. 15 as I type this and it’s 50(F) degrees outside. It hit 52 yesterday and tomorrow is supposed to be just as warm. 50 degrees in the middle of February? In Wisconsin? This just ain’t right. Normal temperatures for us should be in the 25 – 30 range.)
That beastie up there is the Vision Pro 45W laser from Wecreat and it’s been living on my workbench for about three weeks now. Since I already have the Falcon and the Lumos, why would I need another one? This was not an impulse purchase on my part. The Lumos is excellent for what it does, but it is more of a specialty tool. The Falcon is an excellent introductory level laser at a reasonable price and would be good for someone new to this or who only needs to do engravings occasionally and is only going to be cutting 3mm plywood. But I’ve reached the point where I needed a tool with much greater capability.
Specifically I wanted to be able to work with much thicker wood and much larger pieces of wood and after a lot of research the Vision Pro was what I ended up with. The Vision up there has an optional pass-thru roller feeder that allows it to work with boards up to 130″ long and up to 15″ wide. It’s going to let me work with lumber in the same dimensions that I use for my traditional woodworking projects, and that’s exactly what I was looking for. I don’t have the roller feed yet because I’m going to have to do some major rearranging in my woodshop where this thing is eventually going to live, so there’s room for the passthru feeder. At the moment I have way, way too much junk packed into my little woodshop. Some major house cleaning needs to get done in there. I really, really need to get the lasers out of my electronics/radio work area where they’ve been occupying the space that normally was used for my soldering station and test equipment.
Anyway I’m not going to do a review of the Vision because there are dozens and dozens of them already out there. But I do want to talk about what it’s like in actual use over an extended period of time, which is something you almost never get with these so-called reviews you find on Youtube and places like that.
So far I really like this thing. It’s pretty much exceeded my expectations as far as it’s capabilities as a laser are concerned. I picked it up primarily for cutting material. I use this thing more like a sort of CNC machine than a laser engraver. If I want to do engraving I’ll turn to the Lumos which has a much higher resolution and is many times faster, and if it’s something that will fit in the Lumos restricted working area. Doing engraving with a gantry style laser takes a long, long time. Something like one of those coasters I do that takes maybe 2 – 4 minutes with the Lumous would take 15 or 20 minutes on the Vision or Falcon.
Where this thing really shines is when it comes to cutting material. This thing can cut 3/4″ thick solid wood as you can see in that test cut over there on the left. I cut 1/2″ walnut with this thing in one pass with minimal charring, and it slices through 3/8″ thick solid white oak and ash like the proverbial hot knife through butter.
It does have its issues and irritations, though. Some of them are puzzling because they never should have made it into a production model without being corrected first. Especially on a machine this expensive. This thing isn’t cheap. The base version goes for around $2,300 and depending on what options you add, you can end up spending over $3,000 easily. So before you buy one of these. you’d darn well had better have a serious use for it because we’re well out of the “impulse buy” price range here.
If you’re thinking of buying one of these yourself, here are some of the things I found to be irritating or annoying. None of them are deal breakers but they certainly aren’t marks in Wecreat’s favor either because all of these should not have been there in a production machine in the first place.
The Fan Sucks. Or, Rather, the Fan Doesn’t Suck
That little fan is almost totally worthless.
At least not enough. All of these enclosed lasers have (or should have) some kind of exhaust fan that sucks the smoke out of the chamber and exhausts it through a hose or pipe either into an air purifier or to the outside.
(Important: Make no mistake about it. These things make a LOT of smoke and fumes. If you run one of these in your home without adequate ventilation it will not only set off every smoke detector in the house, it will expose you to fumes that are absolutely unhealthy to breathe. )
Now you can get fume extractors that use filters and fans that will allegedly clean the air coming out of these things so it is fit to breathe and won’t set off your smoke detectors. And they work. Sort of. But they’re expensive. The decent ones are on the order of $700+ and they have disposable filters that need to be replaced on a regular basis. So if at all possible you’re going to want to vent these things to the outside. And none of these lasers have an extraction fan that’s powerful enough to push the smoke more than a few feet at best so you’d need to set one up right in front of a window and then seal the window off except for the hose coming off the laser to keep it from blowing back into the room.
I had a 250 CFM fume extraction system installed for years now to vent fumes from my soldering station and that proved to be adequate to vent first my LaserPecker engravers, and then the Falcon and the Lumos. It worked quite well. But for the Vision? Yeah, not so much.
It’s hard to tell because the plastic cover is very dirty but if you look towards the top of the video you can see the smoke this thing puts out. It doesn’t show up very well on camera but in person it’s pumping out great clouds of smoke
Using the Vision to it’s full capacity generates huge clouds of smoke inside of it, and the fan they use isn’t even powerful enough to adequately pull the smoke out of the enclosure much less blow it through ductwork to the outside.
The Vision is made up of two parts. The entire top half of the unit moves up and down to focus the laser. That means there are gaps between the upper and lower parts of the cabinet and smoke is going to seep out between those gaps unless the extraction fan is powerful enough to suck the smoke out before it can escape. And that pathetic little muffin fan isn’t even close to being powerful enough to do it. Even if I’d had the laser parked next to a window and was using only the short little hose that came with it to exhaust it, that wimpy little fan wouldn’t have had enough power to adequately vent the thing and smoke would have seeped into the room. Even the 250 CFM exhaust fan I used had struggled to deal with the smoke the thing generates under hard use. It wasn’t until I replaced it with a 450 CFM fan that I was able to adequately vent the thing to prevent smoke from backing up into my workspace.
The Bed.
If you’re cutting anything with a laser you need some sort of bed to lift the workpiece up off the baseplate. Otherwise when the laser burns through the material the heat and energy of the laser reflects up off the plate and onto the back of your workpiece causing scorch marks or even burns.
The standard bed type in the industry is called a honeycomb bed because that’s sort of what it looks like. A typical honeycomb bed is shown over there on the right in a photo I stole borrowed from somewhere on the internet. These work pretty well. It holds your workpiece up off the baseplate to reduce or eliminate flashback, the edges are sharp enough so that there is little or no reflected energy from the honeycomb itself, and the small openings mean that small parts that are being cut out don’t fall through under it.
And the Vision doesn’t come with one. It comes with some kind of nasty slats in frames that just don’t work very well at all. I suppose I should be grateful that it comes with anything. A lot of lasers don’t come with any bed at all.
I’m holding it over there in that photo on the left and if you look down into the machine you can see that one of the first things I did was replace it with a standard honeycomb type.
I quickly learned to hate that slatted bed when I first got the Vision. The slats are spaced too widely apart so that small pieces fall straight through it onto the crumb tray at the bottom. Or even worse, small pieces will get wedged between the slats and tilt up far enough so the laser head will hit them as it moves across the workpiece, knocking everything out of alignment and ruining the workpiece if you don’t quick pause the laser and pull it out.
Wecreat doesn’t ship a honeycomb with the unit, as noted, but they will gladly sell you one specifically sized for the Vision for… for how much, exactly?
Ah, well now here is where things get interesting. I went looking for a honeycomb bed and found that Wecreat was selling the one for the Vision on its website for $169. Which I thought was way, way too much. So I went looking on Amazon and found… Ready for this? The exact same honeycomb bed, being sold by Wecreat itself, for $69. Yeah. Seriously. On their website they were selling it for $169 while they were selling it for $69 on Amazon.
Addendum: I just did some price checking now and found Wecreat’s website is now offering it for $99 marked down from, they claim $149? Meanwhile it’s still for sale for $69 on Amazon. Sigh…
Loud Cooling Fan
The cooling fan on the laser head absolutely howls when the laser is in operation. I mean it is seriously loud. It’s to the point where it is almost uncomfortable to be in the same room with it. Here, let me demonstrate:
If you crank up the volume on that video up there you’ll hear what I’m talking about. You’ll also see how much smoke this thing generates sometimes.
That hose on the laser head
And that video also shows another thing I’m concerned with, and that’s that coiled cable you see attached to the print head. That’s not a cable, it’s a hose for the air assist system. The Vision (and almost all gantry style laser engravers these days) come with what they call air assist. A jet of air is directed down around or near the laser beam itself as it cuts material. That jet of air is extremely important. It blows smoke and debris away from the path of the laser making it cut much more efficiently and to reduce charring and scorching of your work material. Plus it has the added benefit of helping to prevent your work material from starting on fire which is generally considered a good thing.
The Vision comes with an external air pump that looks sort of like the air pump for an aquarium. It connects to a port on the back of the machine, and then it’s routed up through the side of the machine to that coiled hose you see there and then into the laser head.
It works quite well but I’m wondering about that coiled hose because now after several hours of use it is now in the habit of bunching up when the head travels to the right side of the machine and it rubs against the inside of the top cover. That wouldn’t make me worry much, but there is also an interior light bar and camera mounted on that cover, and it’s hitting that. Now I haven’t had any issues yet but I’m wondering about the long term durability of that hose if it’s rubbing against the top cover and hitting that light bar all the time.
The software
I want to talk a bit about the software too. As I noted earlier the Vision uses exactly the same software, Makeit, that the Lumos uses so I was already very familiar with it. And it’s actually a pretty good program for doing basic design work. It has all of the tools you need for drawing, placing shapes, importing graphics, inserting text, etc. It lets you do the usual settings for adjusting the laser power, the speed the laser travels, etc. Overall it’s a pretty good program and it’s probably the only thing most craftspersons or even semi-professional users will ever need.
The problem is that you can’t export projects in a format that can be used by other software or other lasers. Oddly enough an “Export” function does appear in the menu on the version of the software I’m using, but having that function there is silly because the only format you can “export” to is the proprietary Wecreat format that it saves to anyway. You can import graphics files of different formats including vector files. But export? Nope.
What this means is that unless Wecreat changes this in Makeit or someone has a translator program out there, projects you create in Makeit simply will not work with any other software or hardware platform. This isn’t an issue for me because I do almost all of my design work in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. But if you don’t have tools like that you’re stuck.
There are AI components built into the software but after an initial free trial period you need to subscribe to be able to keep using them. If you don’t subscribe or pay to become a “member” the basic functions of the software will keep working just fine, but the AI functions will be disabled. I don’t really have a problem with this because Wecreat has to pay for access to those AI functions itself. All of those functions are being performed on a special computer out in the “cloud” somewhere located in one of those massive data centers, and somebody has to pay the bills to keep all of that working. I found it useful enough to go ahead and drop the $99 they want for one year “membership” but it’s entirely up to you.
Safety
There is absolutely no doubt that lasers are potentially dangerous. These thing can and will start things of fire under some circumstances so you cannot leave them running unattended. Some of the more expensive ones have some kind of fire detection system to shut the laser down if your work starts burning. Some of them even come with built in fire extinguishers. I keep a fire extinguisher right alongside the workbench both by the lasers and in my wood working shop, and so should you.
The Lumos comes with a fire detection system that seems to work (and sometimes works too well) that will shut the laser down. But it doesn’t have an extinguisher.
The Vision has nothing at all. Not even an emergency shutdown button on the side or front of the machine. A lot of lasers these days, especially the more expensive ones, have an emergency stop button, a big red button that you just slap to immediately cut power to the machine. Even the cheap Falcon has that. But not this one.
The other thing I’m a bit concerned with is eye safety. Lasers, even reflected laser light, can be harmful to your eyes. That’s why I prefer the fully enclosed machines like the Vision and Falcon. The widows that let you look into the machine are supposedly made of a plastic that blocks harmful light so it won’t damage your eyes.
Maybe. I wonder sometimes. I was looking into the Vision when I first got it, looking through the safety glass and watching the laser, and when I looked up I could see spots in my field if vision as if I’d been staring at the sun. Not good. I’ve become a wee bit paranoid in my old age. Here’s the thing, I’ve gotten to the point where corporations, even allegedly reputable ones, have lied to me so often that I don’t trust anything they say any more. Does that safety glass/plastic really block harmful light from the laser? I just don’t know. Maybe? I don’t want to take the chance. I wear safety goggles specifically designed to block the frequency of the lasers I use, and I would strongly suggest you do the same.
Covid update: I am more or less now symptom free. Almost. I am still testing positive however so there’s that. But I guess it’s normal to keep testing positive for a week or more even after symptoms have cleared up because virus fragments remain in the body that the test is picking up. I am probably no longer contagious but I’m still reluctant to go anywhere where I might come in contact with people while I’m still testing positive just in case.
Laser stuff
I’m having way too much fun with this laser stuff. I got bored the other day and found a project on the Crealty Falcon project collection that looked interesting so I loaded that up, ended up with a whole box full of misc. parts, sort of like a big 3D jigsaw puzzle, dug out a set of acrylic paints and glue and the next thing I knew I had this sitting on the table.
Considering this is the first time I’ve tried something like this I think it turned out rather well and I’m pleased with it. It’s simple and sort of abstract but I think it’s reasonably attractive for a first effort. My painting skills leave a great deal to be desired but then this is the first time I’ve done something like this.
It also reminded me how much I used to enjoy building models. Many, many years ago I had a model railroad layout in the basement. It had to be dismantled to make room for the woodshop when we started remodeling the house and I was never able to put it back up. But it reminded me of how much I enjoyed building models for the railroad. I had so much fun doing this that I’m going to be scouting for other projects like this and maybe even design some of my own.
But back to the laser thing. I’ve been enjoying using it so much that I’m seriously considering doing a significant upgrade in equipment here to replace the Falcon. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Falcon. It’s a great piece of equipment at an excellent price. But when it comes down to it, it is still just a 10W laser with some serious restrictions.
I’ve been looking at the 45W Vision Pro from WeCreat. the same company that makes my Lumos. My experience with the Lumos has been so positive that I’ve become interested in their other equipment. The Vision Pro can handle much, much thicker material. Instead of being limited to thin plywood it’s powerful enough to cut actual real boards among other things. It has autofocus and other goodies built into it that make it very attractive indeed.
What’s holding me back is the cost. Am I going to get enough use out of it to justify the cost? As MrsGF has pointed out I don’t do this as a business except for the promotional materials I crank out for the brewery and I am too lazy and unambitious to try to turn this into a business. So is it worth the money to upgrade the laser just for goofing around?
But on the other hand, when compared to what some people I know spend on their hobbies, what I’m thinking of spending isn’t all that bad. I know fellows who’ll drop more on a single engine for their model railroad than what I’d like to spend to upgrade my laser.
Materials
Speaking of costs, I want to talk about materials for a minute. Don’t make the same mistake I just did and make a bulk order of material without getting samples first. I needed some 5mm plywood and bought some of this stuff over there on the left and it is horrible. It looks fine in the photos but in reality it is not nice at all. The surface is rough and sandpapery. While it appears to not have a prominent grain in the images, in reality when engraved the grain becomes very visible and is so coarse it’s just downright nasty. Even worse is the charring. I’ve never run into a plywood that chars and smokes this badly when engraving. Huge billowing clouds of smoke that almost overwhelmed my extraction system and massive amounts of charring that left black dust everywhere. The stuff is completely unusable with the laser. And now I have 50 sheets of the stuff and it’s probably going to end up being used as firewood.
Anyway, be cautious when buying materials. You might be tempted to snag a great deal on a bulk purchase and end up with stuff that’s completely unusable as I did.
New Toy
This is an ultrasonic knife from a company called Hanboost and I’m trying to decide if it’s something I’d recommend or not.
The way these things work is interesting. It takes a razor sharp titanium blade and vibrates it many thousands of times per second. The idea is that the extremely high vibration rate of the blade causes it to glide through material with virtually no effort at all on the part of the wielder. In theory. It seems these things are popular in the 3D printing world where they are used to clean up plastic prints. And someone told me that they work equally well for trimming wooden parts that are laser cut and don’t quite fit properly.
Some of the parts for that house I showed you earlier didn’t fit together properly and I used this thing to trim things to get them to fit and it did work, but results were inconsistent. There were times when it sliced through the plywood like a hot knife through butter. Other times it worked awkwardly and didn’t seem to work much better than a normal Xacto knife. I suspect that at least part of the problem there is my technique. There is a learning curve to developing the right technique to take advantage of this thing.
Overall I like it despite the problems I had. It seems extremely well made and has a nice feel to it and is easy to control. But there is the cost to consider as well. This thing ain’t cheap. It goes for about $190 on Amazon. You’re going to need to use it a lot to justify that kind of expense.
Yeah, seriously. Apparently as the flu was finishing up doing its job on me I contracted Covid too so I’ve been putting up with that for the last week.
I seem to be mostly recovered? Fever is gone. My appetite has been gradually returning. I still have a nasty cough and walking up a flight of stairs leaves me winded. But that seems to be getting better as well. And as MrsGF pointed out this morning when I was complaining, it hasn’t even been a week yet since I was diagnosed and it’s going to take time to fully recover from this. I’m no spring chicken, after all.
The most troubling symptom I had were the panic attacks. I’ve had those before but never so often or as severe as they were during this bout with the flu and I wonder if it was due partly to the Tamiflu antiviral they had me on. Apparently there are some rather nasty and thankfully very rare neurological side effects to the stuff and one of those is an increase in anxiety issues with some people, including panic attacks, hallucinations and other nasties that nobody warned me about when they put me on the stuff. Within about 24 hours of stopping taking the stuff it was almost like someone flipped a switch. My thinking seemed to get more clear, the panic attacks began to disappear, I started to get my appetite back and generally started to feel like a human being again.
Can I absolutely attribute the panic attacks and other mental issues I was having to the drug? No. Of course not. But at the same time it seems more than just a coincidence that within 24 hours of stopping taking it there was such a drastic change.
But enough of that. I’m on the mend, nearly back to normal, and am enormously grateful to that and to MrsGF for putting up with me. So let’s get on with this.
Laser stuff: Needless to say I haven’t been doing any work with the lasers during this time. The last thing I needed was the possibility of stray fumes from the lasers getting into the air and irritating my already very angry lungs and respiratory system.
I do want to talk about CNC machines, though. Right before all of this nonsense started I picked up a cheap, desktop CNC machine. Emphasis on the “cheap” part.
I’d wanted to experiment with CNC machines for many years now but two things have held me back. First was the cost. A good CNC machine is not cheap. A decent ones were always several thousand dollars or more and I just couldn’t justify the expense. The second thing that held me back was the mess. These things spew dust and chips everywhere. It’s the nature of the beast and unless I could also afford to buy or had the ambition to build an adequate enclosure for it, I wouldn’t want one in the house because of the mess.
But these little fully enclosed desktop style machines take care of the mess, mostly. That left just the price. But that’s come down too. This little beast up there was only $400, cheap enough for me to be willing to take a chance on it.
Now that I’m starting to feel better I’ll have a chance to set this little beast up and play with it and see what we got here. From what I’ve seen online this little unit doesn’t seem too bad for the price. It is far, far from the best on the market. Not even close. But it’s probably going to be good enough to give me an idea if this is something I want to pursue without breaking my budget.
Now I need to start to catch up on all of the stuff I had to postpone while I was sick. I was supposed to get together with the owners of the brewery in Milwaukee to deliver a new batch of coasters and other goodies and that fell threw. I didn’t want to take the chance of passing this along to them. And in any case I wasn’t fir for human companionship for a while there.
I was cleaning out stuff and found a whole box full of wooden handled bottle openers. Where they came from I have no idea, but we’re thinking of doing some kind of promotional thing with those so we were going to discuss that. There is apparently another brewpub that wants to pick up my line of joke coasters so I need to see if they would object to that.
Damn, it feels good to being able to think straight again!
Well I think it’s day four. Maybe. This all started Saturday night and it’s now Tuesday afternoon.
Wow, it’s been one hell of a ride.
I’m a bit more coherent now. I think? I hope?
I actually remember very little of a period of about 36 hours starting Saturday night. This is probably not a bad thing because what little I do remember is unpleasant in the extreme. Between what turns out to be an H3N2 influenza infection, two out of control panic attacks, two SVT episodes and two very unpleasant visits to the ER, this is something I would very much rather forget than remember. So the fact that everything about those two days is more than a bit vague is probably a good thing.
So I’m up to day four now and things are doing considerably better. I’m told I was running a fever of 103 when they had me in the ER. That’s down to normal. My head is still badly congested, as is my chest. The cough is nowhere near as bad as it was, but it’s still there. Just walking up a flight of stairs at a normal pace leaves me out of breath at the moment. I have a wicked headache. I slept for almost 4 hours last night which isn’t much, but that’s the most sleep I got since this all started so that’s something I guess.
For the first time since Saturday I’m actually interested in eating and I’m going to take a stab at eating something other than crackers and clear broth a bit later and see how that goes.
They put me on Tamiflu as soon as they tests that confirmed I had the bug came back. I’ve been taking that twice a day and it’s hard to tell if it’s doing any good or not. At best they say it can reduce the severity of symptoms and shorten the duration by a few days and I’ll take anything I can get at this point. At the moment I’m looking at a mix of about 6 different meds, some prescription, some over the counter, that I need to try to keep track of here for the next few days. Ibuprofen, mucinex, my regular blood pressure meds. cholesterol, the tamiflu. etc.
Meanwhile I’m starting to feel guilty about doing nothing but sitting around doing nothing but watching stupid youtube videos and Netflix. I have a half dozen different projects in planning stages or ready to go, I have a new CNC machine that I should have unpacked and started to try to work with, new software I’ve been trying to learn. But it doesn’t pay to try to start any of that even if I felt halfway decent because I can’t really concentrate that well yet. Sigh…
MrsGF noted that this is the first time she’s seen me get this sick in, well, just about forever, really. Even during the many years I was working at the school district exposed to everything from colds and flu and plague for all I know, I managed to avoid coming down with any of it. I honestly have not had the flu or even a serious cold in decades. How I got that lucky I don’t know, but it makes getting hit with something this serious now even worse because I don’t know how to deal with it.
I really, really hope MrsGF doesn’t come down with this. So far she’s symptom free, thankfully. Maybe she’ll get lucky.
Friday night I was feeling tired, had the sniffles, nothing new for someone who has allergies like I have. Only these got worse. By saturday it had developed into an uncontrollable cough. A cough so bad it triggered an SVT episode necessitating a trip to the ER. And in between all fo the panic (on my part) by being hooked up to about 20 different electrical leads attached all over me to monitor my heart, not jujst one by 2 IVs. amd a blood pressure cuff, they’re telling me I’m just fine and I should just relax and try to get some sleep????
Hate to say this bue they ended up giving me a sedative because I was having such a bad panic attack it was screwing up all of their readings.
Somewhere along in there I was told I had influenza H3N2. Oh goody.
Well they got all that straightened out and then bright and early the next day I had another coughing fit that triggered another SVT episode and back to the ER we go…
They go what, him again? Yes, him again, my wife sighs. Well, chuck him into a wheel chair and bring him along. You know where to take him.
Say, I hear MrsGf saying under her breath. After yesterday maybe you should just sedate him right off the bat?
I was just thinking the same thing. We’ll load him up on benadryl…
Good thing they did. Probably saved me oe hell of a lot of panic and them having to deal with an old, fat man having having the raving staggers.
Anyway it’s about 3 AM Monday morning now. At least that’s what the computer tells me. My own personal time sense is all over the place. Last night around 7 PM I thought it was 7 AM and was wondering why it wasn’t getting any lighter out. I just got done putting down a great pile of pills they’re having me take. I don[t know what most of them are but they seem to be working I’m actually feeling quite a bit better.
I’m on the third dose of Tamiflu and it really seems to be helping.
Feeling very weak, though. Even simple tasks like bending down to pick up a show leaves me out of breath. Takes me a minute or more to recover from going up ro down stairs. Dr. swears it’s one of the effects of the flu. they imaged my lungs and basically they’re the lungs of someone with a bad case of the flu. Haven’t eaten anything in something like two days. No appetite, but this morning I’m starting to feel hungry so that’s a good sign I thinK
Note: You can reach me either by leaving comments here or by emailing me at theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com
I’m not sure where the time has gone but it’s been almost three months since I acquired the Lumos that I reviewed last time so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about what it’s like to use it long term. Since I got it I’ve used it to engrave around 200 metal challenge coins, literally hundreds of drinks coasters, made Christmas ornaments, LED lighted acrylic plastic signs, and dozens and dozens of decorative engravings on various objects or parts cut out with my woodworking tools or the Falcon laser. I’ve used it a lot. That should give you an indication of how useful this little laser has been.
The Falcon still gets used a lot but for what I suppose you could call “heavy duty” jobs like cutting out parts or for doing engravings that are just too big for the Lumos. Because of the Lumos’ speed and higher resolution, it’s the one I turn to for doing anything that requires high resolution artwork or intricate engravings.
But I absolutely, positively do not want to try using it for cutting out parts even if the job would fit inside of the Lumos’ working area. Because it’s a galvo laser it lacks air assist, and that means much more charring and even fires starting when trying to cut flammable materials. But for everything else? If it will fit in the laser’s 120mm X 120mm working space, that’s the one I’ll turn to.
Does the Lumos have quirks and “issues”, as they say? Sure it does. There’s no such thing as a perfect machine. With the Lumos these are more irritations than deal breakers, though.
Even the software that comes with it is decent. The “Makeit” software that comes with the unit is how most people are going to use this laser and it is actually pretty good, especially if you register the Lumos and get the 6 month free “membership” that gives you access to the software’s built in AI functions. That opens up a whole new level of creativity and usefulness because once that’s activated you can use their AI to actually generate copyright free images in any style you like, from photographic quality to simple line drawings, that you are free to use any way you like.
That engraving on the side of that box over there on the left was generated with Wecreat’s AI. The prompt I wrote was something like “a black and white line drawing of a cute kitten chasing butterflies through a field of wild flowers” and that’s one of the images it came up with.
You don’t need to subscribe to use the laser or the Makeit software, only if you wish to continue to use the AI functions after the introductory period expires. If you’re doing this commercially and want to turn out a lot of different products for sale it might well be worthwhile, though.
But the Lumos’ software is at the same time the most irritating thing about the whole package, and the main problem with it is that it will only save projects in Wecreat’s proprietary file format. Any projects made in the Wecreat software cannot be exported for use elsewhere. So everything you make with the software is locked in to that hardware platform. At least with the current version of the software.
This isn’t a big deal for me because all of my artwork is made in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator or some other tool and I only use the Lumos software mainly for the actual production run. But this is something you need to keep in mind if you’re considering buying one of these.
Lightburn
The other issue I have with the Lumos is that I have been completely unable to get it to work with what is probably the most popular laser engraving software currently in use by “professionals” out there, Lightburn.
Let me inject some caveats in here first. I do not currently own Lightburn and am working with the “free” 30 day trial version. I wasn’t about to drop $200 (I’d need the more expensive “Pro” version) on a piece of software that might not work with my equipment.
Wecreat doesn’t make getting the Lumos working with Lightburn easy. They claim that it will indeed work with it. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Their gantry style lasers do, and Wecreat does provide guidance to get those working with the software. The Lumos? Nope. Nothing. Nowhere. There is a “.lbdev” file available for the Lumos buried deep in Wecreat’s website which was almost impossible to find. I am not going to direct you to it because as far as I can tell it just doesn’t work.
After many, many hours of fiddling around and extreme frustration, I finally got LB to at least “see” that the Lumos was connected. I even got it to connect to the camera. Somehow. Occasionally. Sometimes the camera shows up, sometimes it doesn’t.
I got it to actually “frame” an engraving in the build space. Good! Then I hit the start button to actually do the engraving and… And it will only work with the infrared laser, not the blue diode. And there seems to be no way to switch between the two. And even when using the IR laser the engraving process would stop with the progress bar in LB sitting at 99% and both the laser and the software apparently locked up and I had to restart both.
I’m giving up for the time being. I wasted way, way too much time on trying to get LB working with the Lumos. If I ever do get it going, I’ll let you know.
Materials
I got lots and lots of questions about what materials to use for projects. I don’t do this on a commercial basis. The only things I buy in bulk are drinks coasters for the brewpub, and generic 1/4 and 1/8 inch thick plywood to make misc. goodies.
I buy basswood plywood in bulk off Amazon. It’s far cheaper than buying it from places like Hobby Lobby or the crafts section at Walmart where you will pay a small fortune.
But before you start buying in bulk, buy a few sheets first if possible to test it because there can be huge differences between different brands. One brand will cut clean with very little char or other problems, while another will be utterly horrible. Take a look at this image below that compares then side by side.
This is the same wood as in the example on the left above. Look at all of the soot on my fingers just from handling it after I took it out of the laser. It’s absolutely filthy with the stuff. I’d have to completely wash this down in order to use it.
Those are two different brands of 3mm basswood plywood I got off Amazon, and both sell for about the same price. They were cut out using the Falcon A1 using exactly the same settings. The one on the right is a nice, clean cut, almost no visible charring on the surface. The one on the left… Oh, dear. Even though it’s the same thickness and I used the same power and speed, it left jagged edges, didn’t cut things out cleanly and there was a huge amount of charring on the edges. And the smoke! You can see the smoke residue all over the surface of the one on the left while the one on the right is almost completely clean.
So always get test samples of any material you want to use in your laser before you start making bulk purchases or you can end up having a complete mess on your hands. I bought 60 sheets of one brand of 3mm basswood plywood where every single sheet warped so badly as soon as I took it out of the package that it was pretty much useless for anything except firewood.
I’m not going to urge you to go out and buy this brand. There are others that are just as good. But what I use currently is over there on the left in case you’re interested. I have no relationship with this company, don’t get any compensation or anything from them. I just think it’s good quality material at a decent price. A pack of 48 sheets of 12″ x 12″, 3mm (1/8″) is currently going for $56.99 on Amazon and it’s a quality product. Very smooth, well sanded surface, very uniform color and grain on the exterior veneer, nice, light color that engraves well and I’ve only very rarely had problems with it warping.
I go through a lot of this stuff. 3mm plywood is the basis for a lot of the projects I crank out and gets used for everything from making little trinkets to some very elaborate art projects, model buildings, etc.
And that’s about it for now. I was hoping to include something about a new cheap CNC machine I picked up but the last few weeks have been so busy I haven’t had an opportunity to really play with it very much. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll have time to get into that and talk about the joys and frustrations of CNC.
grouchyfarmer 