I’m excited to be able to do more detailed artistic features on products. I can do amazing things with my mills but it takes a prohibitive amount of time and expensive, delicate tools to accomplish great detail. The laser is going to let me get that detail without tieing up a $150000 machine.

I’m excited to be able to mark my logo in different places small enough that doing the same engraving on the mill would be impractical/impossible. It’ll also allow me to serial number product practically. Sequential numbering can be a difficult thing to accomplish on mills because of the programming and setup required to do it. For the laser that’s just baked into the software.

60 watt MOPA laser. MOPA is really cool. MOPA stands for Master Oscillator Power Amplifier. Basically it gives you way more control over the laser beam than a standard fiber laser. Doesn’t seem like a huge deal but the exciting bit is that you can laser in color. It gives so much control that you can control the oxide layer that is forming on titanium and stainless steel, there’s more materials that it can work on but those are the two I care about most, and that lets you do color.

You can even laser design color gradients!
The wattage is basically a measure of how fast it can work. More power equals more ability to burn material away. 60 watts is on the higher end of middle powered engraving lasers. I’m also looking forward to learning new software and a new type of machining.