Nottinghack A0 Laser Pledge Drive

[Andrew Armstrong]

Hi all on the Google Group,

Just a repeat of the email to all members yesterday for reference regarding a pledge drive for a new laser cutter. We know a few members will get these but not the centrally orchestrated emails.

It's already got some significant interest if you check the wiki page!

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A pledge drive has started to buy a replacement A0 laser cutter!

If you are a current laser user or eager to use one this is an exciting opportunity for the Hackspace to get a near-new laser cutter at a great price and upgrade our current laser offering.

For those that don’t know the Hackspace doesn’t usually have the funds to outright buy expensive tools, so we work to get pledges for large tool purchases which also help see if there is interest in the tool.

In this case you can add a pledge to the wiki page - pledged money will go against your account for laser time as well! If you cannot add your pledge to the wiki for any reason contact the Trustees to sort. The pledge money will only be requested if the pledge is completed.

The pledge drive is for a Boxford BGL1390 that we have a pledge goal of £3600 for:

• The Boxford offered to us is lightly used and in very good condition and an excellent price (£8932 new, £3500 priced for us)
• It has additional power (+25% at 100W) and we will be repairing the camera/autofocus feature (the other £100 cost)
• It runs LightBurn instead of LaserCut, providing a much better software platform to use when cutting. It is night and day to the old software!
• Boxford is based in Yorkshire and allows easier sourcing of parts, including the autofocus parts we have added to the pledge

Reasons why we are going for this as a pledge:

• The Laser Team is behind the pledge and recommends this as does Dominic, Hackspace member and professional laser cutter maintainer, who organised our original laser purchase and install and can help us with this one. The unit would require no complex changes to meet our needs.
• The price is excellent for what we get - we would not be able to get any comparable laser for this price so a future pledge drive would be much more expensive
• The current laser cutter is nearly 10 years old and has notably increasing problems as time goes on. Some can be possibly fixed at with money and time, but the risk is that the repairs do not fix underlying issues necessitating larger amounts of funds to do bigger repairs, or a new laser has to be brought in the future anyway.

The wiki page outlines all the details if you want more information.

Note pledging for a new laser was discussed at the last members meeting in general terms, but the opportunity to get this one was only really sorted after the meeting and this pledge drive has been driven by the Laser Team itself as the opportunity arose.

Due to this the laser being offered is not going to be available forever so there will be a review of this pledge in 2 weeks time to see if we can promise to purchase it in a good time from the seller so please pledge early. This is why it has been done before another members meeting.

Any questions please ask on Discord in the #laser channel!

Thank you,

Laser Team and Nottingham Hackspace Trustees