You are probably wondering who I am. My name is Thomas, and I started my laser journey in October of 2023. I had always thought it would be cool to have a laser, and or CNC machine. I enjoy working with wood, and other types of crafting. I have a Cricut vinyl cutter, a sublimation printer, a 3d printer, and I make tee shirts, and other crafts, a laser and CNC machine just fit, right? I had added both a laser and a CNC machine to my cart on Amazon. You know how it goes, you add it to your cart, then click the button to Save for Later.

Amazon had a Sale event where the laser, a Creality CR-Falcon 10W, went on a fire sale. I had 15 minutes to add it to my cart, and check out to get the deal, and they were selling only 50 at the price. In those 15 minutes, I secured an Amazon Store credit card, and I purchased the laser. When the laser arrived, I didn’t take into account that I couldn’t use it inside my house. So, I had to buy a workbench from Harbor Freight to house the laser in the garage. After some organizing, and a sheet of half inch plywood, I had a place for the laser.

I don’t know where in my mind I expected all the smoke to go, or maybe I didn’t think it would create any smoke at all, but within a minute or so the garage was completely filled with smoke. I couldn’t see from one side to the other. After some research and YouTube videos, I deduced that I needed an enclosure to contain the smoke and a fan to vent it to the outside. My garage has no windows, so I had to raise the door six inches and place a board to hold the door up and block the cold from coming into the garage.

I purchased an inline 4-inch vent fan and tubing. Like dryer vent only stronger. This worked out nicely. The smoke went outside, and the board kept most of the cold air out. There were other things I needed to purchase to make this work better. For cutting, an air assist pump was needed. For doing round cylinder objects like tumblers, and cups I would need a roller. Well by the time I purchased all the accessories, it ended costing more than the laser itself.

Since I already had the Creality 3d printer, Creality made a conversion kit to make the 3d printer a laser engraver. You wouldn’t want to cut wood with it, but you could engrave slate coasters, luggage tags, pet tags, etc. So, I purchased that kit and now I had 2 lasers going. By now I had accumulated a lot of work making Christmas items. I made 2- and 3-layer Christmas ornaments, slate coasters, bamboo pens, cutting boards and more. I started booking events to sell the stuff I was making.

About the time I needed to make a lot of coasters for an event at a local brewery, the 3d printer laser decided it wanted a new job and ceased to be a laser. I guess it wanted to be a 3D printer again. So I needed a second laser to keep up with the demand, I bought the PRO version of the same laser I had, the Creality Falcon Pro 10W. This meant I wouldn’t have to watch the laser when it switched from engraving to cutting and manually turn on the air assist pump. The air assist was software controlled. I managed to make it through the summer event season, and into the fall.

Jump to late October 2024, and the CR-Falcon went out. It no longer had the power to do tumblers, luggage tags, or anything else. Well down to one laser. Everything was going ok, when a week later the Falcon Pro died. Same issue. Laser just lost all power to do much of anything. All this right before Christmas 2024. What a disaster. I sent a message out of my socials that I would not be available to do any Christmas stuff. It was a sad time for me, because the Christmas season I make about the same, if not more, than the rest of the year.

In late November, I started researching commercial lasers, I needed something more than a hobby laser. Thats when I got the xTool S1 20W Deluxe Package. That includes the Laser, Riser base, the conveyor system that lets me work on materials up to 118″ long, the fire suppression system, the air assist pump, the honeycomb, the rotary for doing round objects, all in an enclosed and safe package. They were still offering the black Friday deal from October. Plus, I got the Air purifier for an additional $499. The air purifier is great! I no longer have to run a vent hose to the door. I have zero smoke and zero odor of burning wood, well when the enclosure is closed that is. You can smell the burnt wood when the lid is open, but that is to be expected.

Jump to today, as I write this it’s January 2nd, 2025, and I am still learning this new laser. It comes with xTool’s XCS software but since I already paid for Lightburn I am using that 90% of the time.

So far, that is MY laser journey. Is yours the same? or totally different?

Until the next post,

…Thomas