Follow up - it looks close in the video, but what’s the distance from the bottom of the tramming plate to the bottom most part of the mount (without laser)? I’ve got about 80mm of budget there if I want to clear the tools in the ATC pockets.
Yup! It’s a bit more than I’d hoped but I can probably hack around that. Thanks!
You’re welcome!
I’m pretty sure we publish the drawings for our tramming plates too, it wouldn’t be hard to get a custom one made up if that would solve your problem.
Hi Eric,
With the new Avid laser kit, do you think you could cut through 9mm baltic birch?
Also, I think it would be a good option to be able to attach the laser to the front of the spindle rather than beside. The reason (or my reason) is that I have a 5x10 machine and I use 5 x 5 sheets a lot. I usually put two sheets at a time. I don’t think there’s enough travel on the X axis to allow both the laser and the spindle to have access to the whole width of the 5’ sheets. But I think the Y axis does have enough travel, if the laser were mounted to the front of the spindle, to reach all 10 ft with both tools.
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It could, it would take a few passes though.
In my testing/experience the 15w is realistically good for material up to 1/4" thick. Anything thicker and personally I’d rather use the spindle that’s 4" away unless there’s a really good reason to use the laser.
That’s why we picked this combo, there’s a decent overlap cutting wise between the spindle and the laser.
We initially were going to go with the 6watt to keep the price down, but it just couldn’t cut thick enough material to pair well with the spindle. The 30 watt is very expensive and overlaps too much with the spindle in terms of cutting ability. The tradeoff between price and cutting ability didn’t make sense to us.
Couple of thoughts questions here:
When I came up with this laser concept I looked around at what some of the other offerings were. Just about every add-on kit I saw required the user to fix the laser near the spindle in some way. To me/us that wasn’t good enough because it required users to take the bit out of the spindle to use the laser, or keep the laser mounted in a way that it could get hit when doing spindle work. That’s why we came up with the deployment mechanism to address those issues.
Now a trade-off is of course you lose some travel on X (or whatever your gantry axis is). Do you have a specific need to reach the absolute edge of all sides of a 5x5 sheet? If you did we do have an “extended gantry” option which would actually increase the travel of your gantry axis so the laser could reach the whole sheet. You can retrofit it in, but there is of course a cost to that. I’d be interested to here your use case.
In terms of mounting it in front of the spindle: You could do that, I’m sure there’s a way to come up with some kind of mount, although I don’t know if the tradoffs would be worth it:
That’s the work area on a 5x5, mounting the laser forward of the spindle would probably lose you two inches in the Y axis. So less than you’d lose in the X, but likely wouldn’t allow you to access the whole sheet.
I think extended gantry option would be your best bet if this is a hard requirement.
I think the 15W is also the sweet spot for engraving too. The 6W is only better if you want to do very high resolution pictures, but its actually too small of a beam for typical marking operations or making logos (you have to spend too much time with crosshatching), and the 30W is complete overkill for engraving wood.
That right there makes me want to try it even more 
Unfortunately, I asked Avid and they said they won’t sell the kit without the laser for the coming months, perhaps later. I have a full OptLaser kit I haven’t installed yet, it would have been so nice to beneficiate from the Avid kit and software here 
Call me back when you get a Metal RF CO2 at 100 wats or better 
Which laser do you have?
Good news here is that you’ll get the software as soon as we release it. It’s very likely that you’ll be able to use it the way it is. If you’re using different pins/laser settings you can alter those right in the software as you’d do with any other Mach setting. This means that you’ll be able to use the XY offsets, and some of the other tweaks that we’ve done in there.
As far as selling the mechanical-only stuff, I’d check in towards the end of July. That may change sooner than we are initially saying.
Ha, exactly why I ordered one. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing
I have the PLH3D-15W. Getting the software would be a very good news because when I tried to configure Mach4 it was not as easy as explained by OptLaser. I didn’t have time to deep dive but if the software is available, I will probably give a new try.
The mechanical stuff looks great too, I’m sure I would buy it if it’s released. I just don’t want to buy a new PLH3D-15W
I hear ya!
Right now there’s some hidden laser stuff that you can unlock. This isn’t made by us, it’s from Warp 9. I think @jjneeb has some steps to unlock it, and even a screenset that could help you out.
We may in the future sell only the mechanical bits, you’re not the first person to ask.
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Yup, if you want to get just the laser working without all the extra cool hardware and software from AVID you can visit my google drive and look for the powerpoint setup instructions: Public CNC Docs - Google Drive
All of the wiring and plugin and Mach 4 configuration info is in there step by step.
Page 22 shows you how to unlock the laser screen in the standard Mach4 screen, and I also have some laser/spindle screens in a directory with other additions that you might find useful.
Nice, this content is awesome. I will give it a try and get back to you if I have some questions.
Thank you so much
@jjneeb has some great information in there. He’s a laser expert!
Hi @Eric ,
Is there some news on Avid selling the Plug and play kit without the laser for the one who already bought a PLH3D-15W?
Thanks
Nicolas
Get in touch with @support at www.avidcnc.com. They are building a list of folks who are interested. They may have some news for you soon.