The Old Grouch Gets A New Laser

(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.

And that wraps this up for now.

Lasers, Covid, Updates And Misc. Stuff

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.

And that’s about it for this time.

Updates, Side effects (?) and stuff

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!

The Flu: Day Four

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.

Well now isn’t this fun?

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

Wecreat Lumos Dual Laser Engraver Follow up, Questions, Etc.

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.

Lumos Dual Laser Engraver from Wecreat: A Sort Of Review. Kinda.

Okay so this is like the third time I’ve started to write this review and each time I ended up with something I found entirely unsatisfactory so I’m going to start this all over again and keep going until I finish this sucker.

I’ve been having problems with this review not because of the Lumos itself, but because I don’t want this to be associated in any way, shape or form with the dozens and dozens of fake crap “reviews” I’ve seen for the Lumos since it was released a few months ago. I’ve sat through way too many of those so-called “reviews” and they are almost universally utterly horrible and completely and totally useless. I’m tempted to go off on a rant about these and maybe I will at the end of this or in a separate article. But I’m not going to waste your time with that now. You’re here to hopefully learn something useful about this thing.

I’m not going to do a typical review. I’m not going to repeat readily obtainable information about this thing. If you want to learn statistics and hear people gushing about how wonderful it is and all that just go look at the dozens of reviews on Youtube and elsewhere. Me? I’m going to talk about what it’s like actually using this thing in actual real world conditions.

So this is it down below. the Lumos from Wecreat (yes, that’s how they spell it) in all of its purple and orange glory. And for those of you who might be interested in actually buying one of these puppies, it sells for $1,200 or so. Ah, strike that. Looks like it’s down to $1,000 as of Nov. 12. That’s without accessories like the sliding table and the rotary tool which are extra cost options.

What makes this unit interesting is that it has two different lasers built into it. There is a more or less normal 10W blue diode laser for working with materials like wood, paper, some plastics, etc. But there is also a 3W infrared laser that lets it actually engrave metal. That’s the real reason I was interested in this purple beastie. I wanted to be able to engrave metal. And at the time I bought it, it was the only one on the market that had all of these features. X-Tool and a couple of others have brought out units that are comparable to this one now, though, so if you’re in the market for one of these do some shopping around.

Personally I think it’s a good looking little unit. Certainly the build quality and fit and finish seem to be excellent. The only visible plastic bit is the orange shield in the front. Everything else is solid, sturdy aluminium. The laser head is the circular unit with the handle attached at the top. It is packed separately and must be attached to the base unit but that takes only one bolt to accomplish and takes all of about 2 minutes. That’s the only assembly that is required. Basically you can put this thing together, plug in the power and USB cables, and be ready to go in about 5 minutes. Then just install the software from Wecreat’s website and you’re all set. You could be up and running with this unit in probably fifteen minutes from the time you open up the box and unpack it. This is a far cry from the first laser engraver I bought many years ago that arrived from China as a box of parts, with no instructions.

I won’t keep you in suspense. I’ve been using this thing for over a month now. And I’ve been using it hard. It’s cranked out about 150 challenge coins, several hundred drinks coasters, along with dozens of one-off specialty projects along with just goofing around with it, and it’s never missed a beat. I’m not your typical hobby craftsperson churning out the occasional birthday gift or Christmas ornament. I’ve been using this in a semi-production environment almost since the day I got it. There have been days where it’s been going non-stop for 6+ hours a day sometimes. And it’s worked pretty much exactly as advertised.

Does it have limitations? You bet. Does it have problems? Sure it does. And I’ll get to those. There is no such thing as the “perfect” laser engraver, after all. But this unit does exactly what it’s specified to do and it’s been doing it very well indeed.

First a bit of background. This is what is known as a galvo laser, and by its very nature that means it has both some very significant advantages as well as some equally significant limitations when it comes to functionality when compared to a gantry style laser like my Falcon.

The biggest advantage is speed. Galvo lasers are very, very fast when compared to gantry style lasers. Gantry lasers have the laser source itself mounted on a movable framework that is physically moved over the surface of the work material by belts, pulleys, stepper motors, etc. All of those mechanical gubbins having to move around seriously restricts the speed at which it can work.

Galvo lasers have a fixed laser source. It never moves. Instead there are tiny mirrors in the head that are moved to direct the path of the laser beam itself. Because the mirrors are very small and very low mass, they can be moved much, much faster. And that translates into getting projects done and out the door much, much faster as well. As anyone in business can tell you, time is money.

But that’s also the biggest problem with galvo lasers because that severely restricts the size of its working area. Where my Falcon has a working area of about 13 inches X 15 inches. the Lumos has a working area of only around 115 millimeters square, or about 4 inches.

The working area of the Lumos is only about 120mm x 120mm or around 4.5 or so inches square.

Now this isn’t as much of a problem as you might think. The vast majority of engraving jobs I do will fit quite comfortably into that working area. If I need to do something a lot bigger I can either use the sliding table, which expands the working area to around 120X420mm, or if I need to do something bigger still I can use the Falcon.

Speed is where this thing really shines. Let me show you with a short video if I can figure out how this upload thingie works…

Egads, it worked!

Now that engraving on a metal business card took about 30 seconds, all together. The exact same engraving using the Falcon took a good 3 minutes.

Since the video thingie seems to be working let me stick another one in here just for the heck of it. This one takes a little longer because it’s a more complex design but what the heck

I should perhaps point out that these videos are real time, not sped up. It’s really that fast.

(FYI: Those are black anodized aluminum business cards. They’re fun to mess with and they’re super cheap. I get 100 for about $9 on Amazon so I use them for experimenting and just messing around.)

This one above shows the infrared laser in action. Instead of just burning the black coating off the metal card it’s actually etching that design into the metal itself. It’s a bit hard to tell what it is because the video is shot through the shielding but that’s a cat watching Santa’s sleigh flying across the face of a full moon.

It’s that IR laser that made the Lumos interesting to me. That and its very high resolution. It’s the only laser in this price range that I know of that has dual laser sources built into it; a more or less standard 10W blue laser and a 3w IR laser. The standard laser works with the usual materials like wood, plastic, leather, etc. The IR laser has the ability to engrave metal.

If you saw the review I did of my Falcon laser you may remember that I used it to work with metal also. But that was different. The Falcon cannot actually engrave any kind of metal no matter what the hyped up advertising might make you think. It can discolor metal but it cannot actually engrave it. It can also be used for a kind of powder coating. A special material is applied to the metal and the laser’s heat causes the material to chemically bond with the metal to give a very durable result. But that’s not engraving as such. Engraving involves the actual removal of material from the surface of the metal.

I did about a dozen of these little metal Christmas gift boxes with various designs and wording. They’re just the right size for gift cards or small trinkets.

If you’re doing this laser engraving thing as a business, here’s a hint. You can pick up these boxes for about $0.50 each in quantity or even less if you shop around, and people will pay actual real money for these things with a nice bit of artwork engraved on ’em. Better still, take the whole show on the road, set up in a booth or table and do custom engraving on the spot for people. Takes only a minute or two to engrave a name or brief message on one of these.

That’s not just discolored metal, that’s actually engraved into the surface of the metal box.

One thing I’ve been doing for years now is I make a whole line of custom drinks coasters for a brewpub in West Allis. One side has pub’s logo, the other has a (hopefully) humorous cartoon or satirical item. Those dopy things have become ridiculously popular and when I send a new batch down there they’re usually gone in a few hours because the customers steal them. Which is just fine with me because the customers hopefully show them to friends and family and helps get the pub’s name out there and attract new customers. So I do stuff like, well, this, for example:

Nope, I don’t read a lot of manga and even if I did I wouldn’t let it influence my drawings. Nope, no sir… Yeah, right…

Yes, it’s an old joke. I used to steal borrow images from late 19th century and early 20th century public domain sources but I’ve been doing that less and less lately and doing my own because it’s hard to find appropriate images from copyright free sources to match a specific joke. They’re fun, easy to do, and the only difficult bit is the amount of time it takes. With the Falcon doing one of these would take 5 minutes or more. I could cut that down quite a bit but only by sacrificing the quality. With the Lumos it takes about 1/3 of the time or even less do do one of these.

I’m afraid that I’ve been picking on West Allis, the suburb of Milwaukee where the tavern is located, of late. I hope the town has a sense of humor because stuff like these pop up…

Yes, I am ashamed of myself. Anyway I’m showing you these because it would have been difficult or even impossible to do this with the Falcon. At least in any kind of reasonable amount of time. As nice as the Falcon is, it just isn’t fast enough, nor does it have high enough resolution to be able to do a decent job reproducing photos like these up there. Just for the heck of it I did the “vegetable queen” one on both the Falcon and the Lumos. On the Lumos it took about 3 minutes. On the Falcon? It took 10+ minutes. See why I’ve been using the Lumos so much since I got it?

The resolution of this laser is extremely impressive. Look at this test image I did on one of those black anodized business cards.

There’s no way the Falcon could achieve that high of a resolution. The width of its laser is just too wide.

Doing photos with this thing is a blast. It gives near photographic quality results on almost everything I’ve tried it with. Over there on the left is a photo of one of my cats that I took. I cut out the background and imported it into the Wecreat software. I found a bit of scrap cork laying around and lasered it onto that with the diode laser and you can see the results for yourself. The resolution of this thing, both the diode and the IR laser, continues to impress me.

Let’s look briefly at the sliding table. I use the optional sliding table for batch runs all the time. Below it’s set up for doing 4 coasters at a time.

I put 4 blank coasters on the table, start it up and it merrily chugs along for about 10 – 15 minutes doing all 4 of them. Then I reload more blanks into it and start it all over again. While it’s chugging along doing the batch I’m usually working on artwork for the next batch of coasters or some other project.

Installing it is about as simple as it gets. Over there on the left you see one of 2 “L” brackets that are included with the laser that screw down into the holes you see on the baseplate. Not only do they serve as makeshift guides to help place material on the bed, they are also used to anchor down the sliding table. The two brackets are screwed down to fit in the white painted line shown in the lower right corner, and in a second one in the upper left corner on the base. Then the sliding table has corresponding holes in its base. Just fit it down over the top of those knurled knobs, plug two cables into the back of the Lumos itself, and it’s ready to go. Takes all of two minutes to install it or remove it as needed.

I also use the sliding table with jigs I make myself (usually cutting them out of acrylic plastic or plywood on the Falcon) to hold small objects. or with guides clamped down to the edge of the table that I use for coasters. Below is a jig I cut from acrylic on the Falcon to do challenge coins 6 at a time.

I load 6 coins at a time into the jig, load the appropriate file and start it going. Engraving coins takes a long time though. Depending on how intricate the design is and how deep the engraving needs to be it can take well over an hour to do one side of all six coins. But since I’m working with non-flamable material I can just let it go while I do something else and I don’t need to actually be there the whole time.

The other optional tool you can get for this thing is the rotary tool and I have that too although I’ve only used it a couple of times.

Engraving things like cups, glasses, water bottles, etc. isn’t something I really do but I wanted to do a few items just to make sure it actually worked as advertised.

Unfortunately, unlike the sliding table which is extremely easy to install and use, the rotary is a pain in the neck. It has to be physically bolted to the base of the Lumos with 3 very small screws which you will immediately lose. I did. Fortunately there were extras included.

It does work well, however. I tried it just this afternoon using the old stainless steel water bottle I carry on the bike. The kit with the rotary tool includes a height adjustable rest with rollers to support the end of whatever it is you’re trying to laser which was absolutely necessary or the bottle slipped enough in the jaws of the tool to get out of position.

The blotch over the “u” in grouchy is from a defect in the surface of the bottle, not from some kind of glitch from the Lumos.

Once I had it set up it worked quite well. I had no issues with it. Basically it works just like any other rotary tool so if you’ve used one before with a different laser using this one isn’t going to be a big deal.

One thing you are supposed to be able to do is take the top off the sliding table, attach the rotary tool to it somehow, and then then clamp that whole conglomeration to the base of the Lumos and use it to making engravings up to 0ver 400mm long on lengthy round objects, with the rotary tool rotating as needed. and the sliding table moving the whole thing left to right as necessary. One of the advertising videos Wecreat has shows them engraving almost the entire length of the barrel of a baseball bat.

Now that’s a neat trick but me, being the 3rd laziest person in the state… Well I couldn’t work up enough ambition to go through all of the work of half dismantling the sliding table, attaching the rotary to it and then trying to test all of that. I’ll just take their word for it that it works and be done with it.

Overall the Lumos has been excellent. It does exactly what it’s advertised to do and it does it pretty darn well. I’m very pleased with it so far.

I want to talk specifically about metal engraving for a few minutes too. I’ve been using laser engravers for years, but I’ve only had diode lasers that couldn’t engrave metal before, so this was something entirely new to me.

Something like that metal box up there that I pictured doesn’t take very long, a few minutes at most. But if you want to do highly detailed, relatively deep engravings for an object that will have to endure a great deal of handling and wear, it is going to take a long, long time. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s a 30 second clip of it engraving a coin:

See what I mean? When I was doing those coins I’d load up 6 of them in the jig, start it going and then go do something else for an hour and a half or so. All those videos you see on Youtube of people doing deep, intricate engravings in just a few seconds? Sorry, just isn’t happening. Those videos are speeded up enormously. Until you get into lasers in the $4.000+ range you can plan on waiting a long, long time to do a deeply engraved, intricate design on something like a coin.

The other thing I want to talk about is that there has been a huge amount of hype with the Lumos and other IR laser engravers about being able to do color engravings on metal, usually showing you pictures like the one over there on the left. If you follow some of the “reviewers” and “creators” or whatever on Youtube, you’ve been led to believe it’s that it is wildly popular with customers, and that it is easy to do stuff like this. It isn’t. IMO it is mostly an interesting gimmick and I had a hell of a time trying to get it to work consistently.

I have gotten this to work and one of my successful experiments is up above. But I burned through a dozen or more of those stainless steel cards before I got results like that. And even that simple design took something like 20 minutes to crank out. More often than not, my attempts to get color turned out looking more like the image over there on the left. Lots of dull browns and grays.

And even more interesting is that these brushed stainless steel cards and a brushed stainless steel bottle opener I had laying around from another job were the only pieces of metal I was able to do this with. Every other attempt using brass, aluminum, copper, and even other pieces of stainless steel were complete failures.

Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, perhaps I don’t really understand how it works well enough to get decent results, but my experiments with getting color have not been encouraging.

And when they have worked the results were never as brilliant as the ones I’ve seen in the ads and reviews, and the process took so long that it wasn’t worth the effort. If you’re doing this as a hobby and aren’t under any kind of time pressure, hey, it’s fun to play with. But if you’re trying to crank out products for sale? The color effects aren’t as brilliant in real life as they appear in the videos. You need to put some kind of clear coat over the top or it will start to fade and even corrode (yes, even stainless steel will corrode over time). And even worse it takes so long to do that I don’t see how this would be cost effective for commercial production.

So let me sum this up. The Lumos is a great little laser. It’s fast, compact, does a nice job. The resolution is excellent. It’s much, much faster than my Falcon. And the price isn’t bad at all. I just saw that it’s down to around $1,000 now, $200 less than mine cost me.

There are definitely disadvantages to lasers of this type, however. There is the small size of the working area, for example. There is the issue of fires to deal with if you’re going to try to cut material with it. I’ll come to that in a minute. When engraving metal it can be very slow. But otherwise I like it a lot and it gets used here constantly.

The Problems

Does it have “issues”, as they say? Definitely.

Let’s talk about fires. Yes, actual, real fire. Whenever you’re using a laser on flammable materials like wood, paper, fiberboard, etc. there is always a danger of fire. This is especially true with galvo style lasers which lack the air assist capabilities that most modern gantry style lasers have.

When trying to cut flammable materials the Lumos can and will start things on fire. It has a built in fire detection system that will shut down the laser, but that’s all it can do, shut off the laser. The burning material will continue to burn until you put it out.

This isn’t the really the fault of the Lumos, it’s just the nature of the beast, as they say. With the Falcon, because it has air assist, I can hit a piece of plywood at full power to cut through it without much risk because the air assist prevents charring and blows out any fires. But that’s not the case with the Lumos. The only way I’ve found to reduce the risk of fire is to use lower power and multiple passes. While it can cut thin wood, etc. this is not the kind of laser you want if you’re going to be cutting a lot of flammable materials.

Sidenote: Smoke and fumes are always an issue with lasers. The smoke and fumes generated from using lasers with almost any material is dangerous and can be highly toxic. Plus, of course, it will set off every smoke detector in your house. The Lumos has a very powerful extraction fan that blows into a large flexible pipe that you can either shove out a window or attach to an extraction fan, like I do. Or you can feed it into a filtration system of some sort. But you absolutely have to do something to deal with the fumes. Unlike other lasers I’ve worked with, the extraction fan on the Lumos is powerful enough that it does a reasonably good job even with the cover open.

As long as I’m on the subject of safety I need to talk about the dangers of laser light to your eyes. Exposure to laser light or radiation can and will damage your eyes. Most of these modern lasers come with some sort of enclosure that has plastics that block dangerous levels of laser radiation. But in the case of the Lumos it is necessary to operate it with the shield raised up in order to use the sliding table or the rotary tool. So you are absolutely going to need eye protection. And unlike every other laser I’ve bought, the Lumos doesn’t come with any. No glasses, no goggles, nothing.

Unless you already have safety glasses, you’re going to need to go buy some if you’re going to use the Lumos with the shield up.

Other things… As I said before I don’t like how the rotary tool attaches to the frame. It bolts not to the actual frame of the Lumos but to the small removable plate that’s inset into the base. That means the rotary tool can be tippy, which is something you absolutely do not want. It’s also very awkward to try to get those fiddly little screws attached to the base. They really need to come up with a better way of attaching it.

My biggest complaint about the Lumos isn’t the hardware, though, it’s the Wecreat software that comes with it. The software has a lot going for it, especially if you’re a “member” or whatever they call it and the AI functions become active. (I suspect that they’re going to demand I pay some kind of subscription fee once my initial membership expires to keep the AI functions working. At this point I’m not sure if that’s going to be worth the expense or not.)

The AI functions are actually quite good. It can generate complete images based on whatever you type in, and it does a reasonably good job of it. The AI can help to “process” imported photos to help get better results as well.

The software does everything it needs to do, pretty much, but it is unnecessarily awkward to work with. Different functions and settings that should all be gathered into one place are scattered all over in different pop up windows and menus for no rational reason I can come up with.

The font search for the text tool doesn’t seem to work at all. I could type in the exact name of a font exactly as listed in the list, and it couldn’t find it. I’d have to scroll through an apparently endless list of fonts to find the one I wanted.

The materials settings were even more frustrating. You can bring up a list of materials and when selected it’s supposed to change the engraving/cutting settings to the ideal settings for that material. This is a common feature with the software that comes with most of these lasers these days. Only absolutely none of the recommended settings actually worked. None of them. I found myself suspecting they just copy and pasted the settings from a different one of their engravers and never bothered to see if they actually worked.

I ended up wasting a hell of a lot of material just experimenting to try to figure out the ideal settings for the materials I was using. If I went with what the software recommended, I’d get results that were so light they were almost invisible or, even worse, that literally started the material on fire.

Copy/paste of objects between different work spaces doesn’t work at all. Select an object in your currently active work space. Create a new work space and click “paste” and… nothing.

The most irritating thing I found with the software is that it doesn’t let you save your designs in any format other than Wecreat’s own proprietary format. You can work for hours designing a nice engraving, and then you can’t save it in a format that will work with a different laser. Even the Falcon from Crealty lets me export a design in .SVG format so it could be used elsewhere.

I’m hoping that a future version of the software fixes this. But at the moment anything that I design in the Lumos software can only be used with one of Wecreat’s lasers, it seems. Be aware of that if you do your own designs. If you only work in the Lumos’ software, you’re locked in. If you get another brand of laser or Wecreat goes out of business, all of the work you put in designing those engravings is going to be lost.

This isn’t a big deal for me because I do almost all of my design work in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Then I export it to a .PNG or .SVG file and import that into the Wecreat software for actual use. But a lot of people, especially hobbyists, don’t have access to those tools and depend on the software that the laser comes with. If you use the Wecreat software to design engravings, you’re locked to the company. If the company goes out of business or if you want to switch to a different brand of laser, at the moment there seems to be no way to move your work over to a different machine.

Supposedly the Lumos is compatible with Lightburn, which is more or less the software package that most professionals and serious hobbyists use these days. I don’t have Lightburn and I’ve never felt a need to get it. I’m quite comfortable using the tools I already have to do basic design work and then import it into whatever software the laser I’m using comes with. However, if you’re planning on doing laser engraving for actual production work for a business, it is something you should look into.

And that’s about it. If I come up with anything interesting in the future while I’m working with this laser I’ll keep you informed.

Record Reviews. Sort Of.

One of the things I do is sort, clean, and grade albums that come in as donations to a local charity and I thought hey, I’m bored. Why don’t I write brief reviews of some of the stuff that comes through the doors? So here goes.

Bear in mind that these are personal opinions and everyone’s taste in music is different. Also the price that I eventually put on a record is solely based on what I think it will bring in the store. General rule of thumb for the store for almost all of the items we sell is we look at the average used sale price and we charge 1/3 of that. Why not charge the full used price? Because we wouldn’t get it, first of all. Second we need ot move product through the store fast because we don’t have a lot of shelf space or storage space.

You Gave Me Love by BJ Thomas.

I’m not a BJ Thomas fan to begin with but this one was bad even for him. Mechanical, emotionless, wooden performances across every song on the record. Basically it’s generic background music with a semi-Christian theme. Entirely unappealing. At best ignorable. Is this really the same guy who did “Raind Drops Keep Falling on My Head”? Apparently it is. Sadly, the disc itself is in good condition so I don’t have an excuse to just chuck it into the bin. We price our albums at about 1/3 of what they’re going for, on average, on the internet outlets like eBay, etc. This one is going for a whole three bucks on eBay so we’ll put it on the shelf for $1.

Happy Man by BJ Thomas

Yes, another one. Sigh… This one is all Christian and even though the liner notes make a big deal about him being an enthusiastic Christian, he doesn’t seem to be able to summon up enough of that enthusiasm to sound interested in anything he’s singing on this album. Despite cover damage the disc itself looks pristine almost as if it’s never been played. Considering the uninspired musical accompaniment and Thomas’s dreary, unemotional singing, “Happy Man” isn’t going to make anyone very happy. The longer I listened to this thing the more I had an urge to throw a rock at the turntable. $1.

Air Supply Greatest Hits

I admit I’m not a big fan of Air Supply but even so, after dealing with those two Thomas albums, having this one turn up is refreshing and some of their stuff was genuinely good. And unlike Thomas who’s performances were so stiff and mechanical he might as well have just stayed home, these guys at least put a lot of effort and heart into their singing and some of it is genuinely enjoyable. And the disc itself is in nearly pristine condition. The price reflects that. Where Thomas’s stuff is going for about $3 on the used market, this one is averaging around $15. This one will go out the door for $5

The Sound of Music. The original first edition of the sound track including two copies of the original

The Sound of Music is a bit divisive, if you’ll forgive me for using that term. People seem to either love the music and the movie or they absolutely loathe it. I have to admit to being a bit prejudiced because I have fond memories of the movie and the music. When it first came out the nuns at school actually went and hired a bus and schlepped my entire class up to Green Bay to see it which meant getting out of class for almost an entire day. It is silly, ridiculous, nonsensical, illogical… the list goes on. But it’s a musical and musicals are generally all of those things to begin with. Would I recommend someone actually spend money to buy the album? Not unless they were already a fan of cheesy musicals in the first place. Would I spend money on this? No. It was pleasant to listen to. Once. As for value? Despite the fact this is the original release of the album, that it includes two pristine copies of the booklet that almost always gets lost, and that the record is in very good condition, it still isn’t worth much. It’s going for about $7 – $15. At the store I’d put $4 on it.

Angels of the Deep by Sweetbottom

I’d never heard of these guys before and to be perfectly blunt, that cover didn’t give me a great deal of confidence because… Well I mean just look at them. They look like refugees from a 1980s porn film. This was a pleasant surprise, though. Turns out they’re local, a fusion jazz band from Milwaukee. The music is pleasant, fast paced, upbeat and generally well done. Not something I’d buy myself but if I was visiting someone and they put it on the record player I wouldn’t be so irritated that I’d throw a rock at the turntable as I probably would if someone put one of those BJ Thomas records on. Their albums do show up on the internet. Looks like they average about $7+ used so this one will go out the door for $2.

Bobbi Sue by the Oak Ridge Boys

Hey, it’s the Oak Ridge Boys. What can I say? At their best they’re a fun band. This album is about average for them, a mix of pretty good with some mediocre filler. Alas, their stuff doesn’t go for much on the used market either. Looks like average price is about $7 so even though this one is in pristine condition it’ll go on the shelf for about $2

Free Room & Board by Don Wharton

First I want to make a distinction between true, traditional gospel music and what I call “modern Christian” popular music. I love gospel music. It is full of life and love and enthusiasm and joy and emotion. It is a celebration. We host Gospel Fest here in Hilbert every summer, a two day celebration of gospel music that is full of life and faith and love. Even if you aren’t a believer yourself the music can be amazing.

Meanwhile there is what I call “modern Christian” music which is… Well it’s this garbage. Insipid, dull, tedious, and being sung by someone expressing all the emotional range of a potato. It’s generic, emotionless pablum. Even worse is the fact that Wharton isn’t a good singer to begin with. He’s off key more often than not. I didn’t think I’d ever say this but he makes the two BJ Thomas albums I started this off with sound good in comparison. I should add that this is one of the worst quality pressings I’ve ever seen. Paper thin vinyl, the spindle hole is punched off-center, etc. I’ll put $1 on it but if it were up to me this one would have gone straight into the bin.

Mountain Music by Alabama

Okay, what’s going on here? Another genuinely good recording? Someone actually donated some good records to us? Apparently yes. Alabama Mountain Music. I’m not a big fan of country style music but I still like these guys. IMO this isn’t one of their better albums but it’s still pretty good. Alas, this is another one where quality of the music isn’t reflected in the price. Looks like this one is averaging about $6, $9 used so this one goes out the door for $3.

The Partridge Family Sound Magazine

Yes, it is the abomination that was the Partridge Family. It is difficult for me to express how horrible the Partridge Family really was. None of them actually played any of the instruments they were shown with. The only one who was permitted to actually sing at first was Jones. Everything else was lip synched and voiced by studio singers. Even in their “live” performances. But after a time Cassidy was finally allowed to sing his own parts once he repeatedly demonstrated to the producers that he, like Jones, could actually sing. Show up at the store and we’ll let you have this horror for $1. Frankly, though, it should be buried at the crossroads, at midnight, with a stake through it so it doesn’t come back to haunt me again.

Strange in Town by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band

Hey, it’s Bob Seger. It’s the Silver Bullet Band. It’s the Stranger in Town Album. First song on the album is Hollywood Nights. Followed by Still The Same. Do I really need to say any more than that? Ome of my favorites. The disc, alas, is not in perfect condition but it’s still acceptable. This one will go for $6.

Let’s end this on a high note. I still have about 25 records left to sort and there’s another box full up at the store waiting for me so I need to get cracking here.

Yes I’m Still Alive!

I know it’s been ages since I wrote anything here but that’s because it’s been crazy busy here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. The gardens were spectacularly prolific this year and dealing with all of that has been a struggle for me and MrsGF. It’s October 4 as I write this, it is 91(F) degrees out there, and we’re still harvesting peppers and tomatoes. Plus the brussel sprouts are now starting to come on strong and we have something like 15 big butternut squash ready to pick that we’re going to need to deal with.

We’ve given up trying to process the stuff ourselves. We ran out of freezer space and canning jars long ago. We’ve been giving it to two or three of the local food pantries and they’ve been very grateful to get the stuff. The food pantries have been struggling to keep up with demand over the last few months as it is, and because of recent funding cuts the demand has only been increasing. We took about 40 lbs of tomatoes to one pantry and about 15 pounds of jalapeno and bell peppers and our friend who volunteers there said it was all gone within a couple of hours.

Still the end is here for both the tomatoes and peppers. We’re going to do one last picking of both and then the plants are going to get yanked. The tomatoes stopped blossoming some time ago and the existing fruit is almost done developing. The peppers are still flowering somehow but have slowed down to where there’s no point to keeping it going. We’re going to wait until the weather cools down a bit before we tackle all of that though.

Speaking of weather, it has been seriously strange. It’s the first week of October. It should be in the low 50s at the most, with temperatures getting down close to freezing or even a bit below that this time of year. Instead we’ve been locked in this streak of hot weather for weeks now with daytime highs pushing well into the 80s or more. Normally we might get a few days of warmer weather this time of year, but not this warm and not for this long.

When I haven’t been puttering in the garden I’ve been busy cranking out a whole new line of hopefully amusing drinks coasters and re-drawing the artwork on the old ones to reprint some of those. Looking at the artwork on some of those first ones I made makes me wince today. So before re-printing any of those I’ve been cleaning up the artwork or even re-doing it entirely.

I also have other stuff in the works, like engraving coins, making specialty tokens and quite possibly custom glassware and other goodies. Thanks in part to a new acquisition, that weird looking thingie over there on the left.

That’s a Wecreat Lumos 3W infrared and 10W blue diode laser that comes with a flatbed conveyer thingie and a rotating thingie that I have yet to play with but will hopefully get set up yet this weekend.

Ooo, it’s got a rotating thingie! Cam’t wait to play with that.

It definitely is not going to be replacing the Falcon laser engraver/cutter. This one is entirely inappropriate for jobs I use the Falcon for. This one is going to be for specifically doing metal engraving and, hopefully glassware and jewelry.

Keep an eye out for a full blown review of the Lumos in the future. It is both enormously useful and great fun to use, and enormously frustrating at the same time. Which seems to be about par for the course for these things.

It’s main use here is for metal. Even as we speak it’s engraving “challenge coins” for a small scale production run. It’s not fast, true. I wouldn’t want to have to use this to try to crank out a significant number of items. But for a run of a dozen or so items it’s not too bad.

Anyway, more about that later as I said.

The new EG4 12000XP inverter is more or less installed and working just fine. It’s still in “testing mode” so to speak as you can see in the photo because we haven’t finalized the wiring. Those of you who are yelling at the screen about the wiring not meeting code and all of that, I probably know the NEC better than you do and I should point out that when that photo was taken we were still testing and hadn’t yet finalized the wiring. So before you launch into some kind of rant about it in the comments, just don’t.

There were some teething issues with the 12000XP, but they were minor. The first was it wasn’t “talking” to the batteries. That turned out to be a communications configuration error that was quickly corrected. The second was an odd glitch where the AC side would trip out with an overload error if there was power coming from the solar panels, and if the batteries were at 100% SOC an if there was an AC load of more than about 200W. And only if all three of those criteria were met. That turned out to require a software update and as soon as the firmware was updated it was working just fine indeed.

Now we just need to get the new solar panels up on the garage roof. They’ve been sitting in the garage since February waiting for eldest son to clear up some time on his calendar to work on it because MrsGF won’t let me do more than climb a step ladder after she caught up up that tree last spring stringing up an antenna.

And that’s about it for now. Thought I’d better post something to reassure the people who thought I was dead or something. Hopefully the Lumos review will be coming up in the near future.