New K40 owner - decent out of the box !!

[vinito]

Hi Folks. I just received one of the now sub-$300 K40 eBay laser machines this week and tried it out a little today.

I went through it and was surprised that the connections and condition were good. One small dent in the tray thing and the amber window had cracks at two of the bold hole areas. I feel lucky.

Not only that, but checking out the alignment revealed that it was pretty close. First surface was hard to see a change from near/far and the second one was only off less than a millimeter. So I decided to give it a try.

Once I figured out installing the software toolchain (which took a bit of time) and entering the proper board & serial # info into the plugin, I did a quick box test and it seemed to move around properly. So I cut the box in some paper and voila! Not a hard test, but so far so good.

Downloaded a vector USA map and cut it out too - worked fine.

So moved to engraving a little and so far that is OK too. Engraved a name plate I need for a project (already did the artwork) into a scrap blank PCB with solid green mask and that came out OK. Then tried marking some black anodized aluminum and that turned out much better than I thought it would, and on the first try.

So I know I'm getting a little lucky and there will be more wrinkles to discover once I start working it harder, but with all the different upgrades possible if necessary, I'm not worried about getting it to do what I got it for.

I'm off to tweak the alignment to be more perfect, explore the focus situation, then maybe I'll try cutting through some thicker stuff maybe and see how that goes.

I guess I'm kind of wondering if I may have just bought from a more reliable source or if the general assembly quality of these things has finally been moved up a notch? If it was my business to build and sell these machines, personally I'd try to take a minute before I sent it out the door to increase the chance that it just comes back. That might well be false hope or bad logic in the business world, but the Chinese are getting better at making stuff all the time and I can see how the assembly quality might could improve over time.

[Arthur Wolf]

Let's have this conversation again 6 months from now :) Those machines don't age well in general.

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Courage et bonne humeur.

[vinito]

More than likely, what will not age well is my own demands on the machine. I have no illusions that this will just work great from now on since I've never seen a reviewer leave theirs as-is and not upgrade several things. I'm just surprised because I'm pretty nitpicky as a rule and this machine turned out to work better than I thought it would for its first day.

My "plan" is to use this thing to its potential, upgrading things as necessary, and build a larger more powerful one from scratch to replace it at some point. For the money, these seem like a good way to dip my toe in the water.... though probably not the water in the coolant bucket since the cheap pump would possibly give me a jolt!

[Randy Draves]

I am also considering buying one of these machines from ebay. I just recently built the 3dp burner from thingiverse and quickly realized it's limitations. If you don't mind would you share your "reliable source?" There are so many different sellers of this on ebay. Maybe I might get "lucky" buying from the same seller as you did.