In case anyone wants to, you can make your own DIY Aluminum honeycomb. Now granted it may not be that much cheaper, and definitely much slower. But it is an awesome education, and if you were like me and only needed a small 13.5" x 10" section, and had excessive amounts of left over aluminum flashing from another project it might make this more attractive. The end result turned out great, it took about 4-5 hours to make my little tiny piece. But I was under a deadline where I didn't have time to wait for shipping, and there was no local supplier. So I'd advise nobody really look at this as a viable alternative, but it does work wonderfully well in my setup!
The process I used was straight forward. Before I pulled out my old bed I cut up a drill powered aluminum strip corrugation machine I designed up. Cut 50 strips of 15" long x 3/4" wide aluminum flashing. I had pre washed all my sheets with acetone and alcohol to remove the coating they put on the flashing. Super glue does not like to stick to that coating, and that was my planned adhesive to bind the corrugated strips together into my end product. Now I realize technically it's not a honeycomb, it's more of a glorified corrugated aluminum sandwich. But I get all the benefits of honeycomb, and for my setup this geometry was plenty rigid enough. Here's a video below of the corrugation machine I talked about.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10203218877088139&set=vb.1094917307&type=2&theater
And for anybody who's been following my posts of woe trying to convert my Chinese laser cutter into what I now lovingly refer to as my Chinese-A-saur you can see my final product.
For about $100 - $150 I tripled my cutting area, reduced the noise by half if not more, can now raise and lower the bed at four different points for precise laser focus across the entire platform, increased the speed by a significant amount, added air assist for cleaner cuts, and an extra exhaust booster fan to reduce smoke buildup in the cutting chamber, and improve optics life. I also added an improved physical control interface, with the ability to switch all the multiple support systems on with the switch of a single button as opposed to having to plug in three or four different devices.
The bolts sticking up out of the bed are for bed height adjustment, I felt like an automated solution was overkill for the size of my cutter. I simply cut slots into the tops of the bolts for adjustment with a flathead screw driver. The bolts are attached to the frame of my machine with a custom 3d printed bearing housing that holds the bolts.
I plan on changing my air assist to a better setup that I saw Richard Taylor use on his conversion. it essentially is a 3d printed shroud that mounts around the lens assembly and directs air straight down as opposed to my sideways facing air assist. Which works okay, but still has some browning occasionally in the direction of air movement.
Anyhow this was definitely worth 1/6 the price of the entire machine to make it many times more capable then it was before. But I anticipate upgrading to a larger platform eventually, and I think Lasersaur has won a special place in my heart to be a likely candidate for a large platform laser cutter.
It was a fun project, but nice to move on to new things. And to get this Chinese-A-saur to revenue producing work. Although I have already earned about 1/3 of what I paid for it including the upgrades with no real active advertisement. Below you can see how I use it in a mobile engraving stand I run out of the trunk of my car. Power the setup off the car's battery, alternator setup with a 800 watt inverter. Works great, and is fun to see customers reaction.
Thanks everyone for your help!
Andrew
