Sounds like great ideas!! sounds like my next purchase, as long as my wife says ok. Also how high above the board can you get the laser, to get stuff under? is there any wiggle room to where it magnets on?
There is no wiggle room. Wiggle room would not be your friend. It’s pretty solid.
The bottom of the shroud of the laser is slightly lower than the collet…and it stays with it - so it has about the same clearance as the CNC itself - probably a little more. You will lower your laser to about 1/8th of an inch from the workpiece when you’re using it. This has caused me a little grief in past projects - because I wanted to burn the cavity in a tray - and I couldn’t get close to the edges because I was making contact with the lip. But that’s a rare problem.
There are several mounting options, depending on what else you have on your CNC (for example, I have a SuckIt and HDZ, so I’m using JTech’s SuckIt mount…but there are others).
And one more comment re: the shroud bumping into a lip of the piece:
One of the nice features of Lightburn (which I WISH CMotion had) is “FRAME”, which moves the CNC head around the perimeter of the job to be cut without the laser being on. This gives you the ability to see the boundaries of the job on the piece and be assured there’ll be no contact with any supports, lips, etc.
I bought the JTech laser option that mounts directly to the spindle. One thing I did notice, JTech gives you a piece of acrylic that is 1/8’’ thick for adjusting the space between the laser and the working surface. I felt that using the hard piece of plastic was risky when adjusting the distance. When jogging, if you went too far you could break something. I replaced the piece of plastic with an 1/8’’ piece of foam. Now I feel safer.
Interesting…
I use the plastic. Once I get in the vicinity of the piece, I change the travel to .02" or something like that and then wiggle the plastic as I lower the Z until I can’t move it. Basically, the same technique as the paper zeroing technique for CNC-ing.
In general, the need to set the distance by typing in Lightburn is a bit of a drag. I often worry I’ll lose a decimal point or something. It would be great to have a shortcut (like the 1-4 keys in CM) that you could customize to specific distances. That would make it much easier to work. I think I’ll put that request in on their forum, now that I’m thinking about it.
Well you guys talked me into it, ordered one this morning!
<= those are not sunglasses, they’re safety goggles for whenever you’ll be using your laser. Yes, I like to state the obvious sometimes 
Oh, also, welcome to the shapeoko laser club and happy burning!
Great! Which kind of mounting did you order?
Went with the 7W (go big or go home right!) and the Mount for the dust boot. I am a bit worried though, my wife said yes awfully quick…
You’ll like the JTech unit, mine has been great.
As far as your better half saying yes awfully fast, I’ve learned from past experience that it will end up costing me twice what I’ve spent on an item. That’s the only reason I haven’t pulled the trigger on a shiny new bass boat…
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As for the tips and tricks to align a CC and Lightburn project, please share.
I have just used a small circle that I vbit in CC, then manually align my laser to fire in the hole. Pretty good results but it’s a bit slow and hard to see exactly where the laser is.
Also in general what ‘mode’ does everyone use for defining the workspace? I use current position which I just put the project in the middle of my waste board and manually align the laser to front left or center. It would be nice to have the laser use the CM X and Y but I have not found a way to do that.
Thanks
The trick is aligning the designs between Lightburn and CC. What I do is create a bounding rectangle around the entire design in whichever product I design in first. The Rectangle is not Outputted, it’s just a reference - I center all of the components of the design within that box. Then I export the SVG, making sure to include the bounding rectangle. When you import that SVG into your other program, you can be sure that the center of the design is still the center of the design and that all of the components are exactly registered related to the center.
Less than two years ago, Lightburn and CC used different pixel counts to size their SVG’s and when you moved them between products, they’d change size…you couldn’t use them to register the components. But a few of us lobbied both companies and they made the changes necessary to eliminate that problem.
As for not having to re-zero - I had come up with an idea that really had merit, but I haven’t taken the time to do it yet. The idea was to create a macro in LB (where it’s really easy to create macros and execute them in the Console) that would move the gantry precisely the difference between the center of my router’s collet and the center of the JTech laser. I’d figure this offset out by burning a dot on center using LB, then, without moving the gantry, go into CM, set XY Zero, then zero a vbit on the dot I just burned (by moving the gantry). The offset from zero in CM would be the precise XY changes between the laser and the collet center. Then I’d create the appropriate macros (CM to LB and LB to CM) which would move the gantry that specific amount.
Basically, I would bring the gantry to zero in CM after doing some carving - then open up LB, run the macro (which would position the gantry in the compensated position) and I’d be all set to Run from Current Location as the zeroed point.
But I haven’t done that yet…I will…I swear. In the meantime, you just have to be careful that your zero mark on your workpiece isn’t going to get cut away, or obscured, by whichever process is going first. The macro would definitely remove that concern.
- Gary
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There’s also the camera accessory that LightBurn offers which allows real time overlaying of the design onto the workspace/workpiece. I haven’t invested in it, but from what I recall, it was pretty affordable and seems like a good tool once set up.
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One advantage that Vectric added to their software line was the ability to capture this offset permanently. This way a design can be cut out with the router, and decorated with the laser just as if the laser was another tool in the drawer. Seems to work a treat, but I personally don’t have the laser.
PS. @GJM you might want to evaluate whether you should change some of your post’s references to “CC” (Carbide Create) when you might have meant “CM” (Carbide Motion.)
Done. Thanks for the edits!
In Lightburn, you can create GRBL macros and assign them to one of 8 user-defined buttons on the “Console”. Then, with one click, you execute them. It’s really convenient.
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