Was engraving some wood this evening and the laser head sounded like it crashed against the side wall. There was no obstruction or anything anything for it to hit so I’m not sure why that happened. Now it’s giving me an error saying “please install the Cone before using air assist”
Tried rebooting multiple times. I’d love to learn how to reset the cone if this happens again. The laser is currently inoperable.
What can we do here? My success rate with the red laser is about 25% at this point. Is there room in the budget to overhaul or just get a new laser? This is the only piece of equipment I come here to use and it never works. Let me know what I can do to help. I was a laser engraver for about 4 years. I worked on epilog lasers, but the concepts are the same. I don’t want to start taking this machine apart without permission.
@dannym red is currently inoperable. It says please install cone assist every time.
@MisterMayhem I’m on my phone so not as easy to link but I posted about this yesterday as well. I kept getting 3 different errors yesterday including the head crash one. Danny witnessed it in person and was a but befuddled by it.
CC @EricP
I did have a plan for a full refurb on the cheap which would likely resolve any outstanding issues. I couldn’t get backing for it though and the deal fell through, and I’ve been mighty disappointed on that front.
Pearl is capable right now, it’s a 32x18 true 100W RF-CO2. I do have some major upgrades planned but it’s capable as-is once the exhaust gets hooked up correctly.
Tarkin is the next laser, it’s an enormous 1.6M x 1M bed and well over 200W of beam, which is just insane.
Tarkin is the replacement for Red – any time or money we spend limping Red along delays getting Tarkin online. Once we have a reliably running big laser again, we can evaluate Red’s destiny as a hacker project.
Personally I think we’re better off having more smaller lasers than dedicating floor space to multiple large-format machines, but nothing’s set in stone at this time. Pearl’s pretty decent; we’re looking at Laguna machines too.
I do a lot of large projects on the Red
And according to the Skedda, Red Laser is one of the most popular tools we have in the shop
I’m pretty sure that the main reason for it is the bed size.
Please, let’s keep at least one large-format machine.
That Tarkin thing sounds like a great replacement for the red.
And another medium-size bed laser can probably go next to the Red Laser instead of the glass-engraving machine (or whatever that thing is) which nobody used for a very long time if I’m not mistaken.
Let me know if you guys need help with moving things around or such
Thanks
FYI, the head crash error is still happening tonight very regularly.
Thought this may be notable to show you @dannym . I just noticed these last two head crashes caused the laser to skip to the left on the print. It got ever so slightly further the second time as you can see from the skip lines. Amount it skipped to the side is not consistent.
And this one now is the first time I’ve seen it with a vector cut. All mine had been during raster previously. It doesn’t appear that any components are hitting anything.
Side note, also regularly getting the cone error.
To me this seems like it could be 2 things. Old mechancical parts that are getting rickety (bad teeth on belts or motors, or the motors themselves starting to burn out). Or bad data being sent to the motors. Possibly due to dusty connections. Just my guesses.
Having one large bed laser and 2 medium bed lasers sounds like a great idea. We can make sure to encourage limiting time on the large laser for larger projects.
Again let me know what I can do to help out.
Thanks Alexis,
I’ll reach out next week and we can discuss you getting more involved with the lasers.
Hey Jon, literally the only reason why I come to hackerspace is because of the bedsize of the red laser. I do not come here to use small lasers. There are plenty of other space around Austin that carry small lasers. Hackerspace is the only place in central texas that allows us to use lasers such as big red or bigger (considering that we get the tarkin). I am excited and grateful to have a bigger laser s this is how I make my living. I have talked to many people at the space, and everyone I have personally spoken to—wants a bigger laser. This is an objective advantage over any other makerspace that will make hackerspace stand out and bring more makers to the space.
@Felipeg101, rest assured we are aiming to keep 1 large laser in the fleet and the main goal right now is having that 1 large laser be consistently functioning well. @dannym has been making progress on Tarkin and we’re trying to get some clear tasks to bring it fully online with more members involved in the process.
I could use some help with Tarkin. It’s got a jam on the Z-axis. Fairly simple system, I can see it’s a mechanical jam, possibly a bad bearing. Additionally the pulley for that axis is slipping, but that’s in part because of the jam.
We really do need to change the thread title here, BTW.
