Introduction

First Post 

Hi guys,

welcome to my (inofficial) blog about the DC- K40 laser engraving machine.
First of all, i have to apologize for my poor English. In my first post, I would like to introduce myself and tell you the reasons and aims for this blog.

Who am I?

I am a young student from southern Germany. I'm graduating soon and I want to go to university afterwards to become an engineer. I have built technical stuff since i am very young, because my father has a good workshop and has had an own laboratory for chemistry and electrical stuff. I come from a rather small city (27k inhabitants) with a lot of high-tech industry. My city has more jobs than inhabitants and one of the biggest German automobile producers has a huge production plant witch research and education facilities here. More about that afterwards.

Why have I bought this laser?

Some of the companies in my surrounding offer a kind of hands-on training for young people like me. So I took the opportunity to take part in a workshop about CNC machines. There I learned the programming and handling of really big CNC- machines, what was very interesting. But more interesting was  the experience with a laser cutting and engraving machine they had there (that was an i.Laser 4000, approx. 44k€). Our instructor allowed me working with that thing and this was so impressive, that I soon worked more with the laser than with the CNC machines (and I am very, very thankful to the instructor!!)

But when the workshop was over, I still have had many great ideas. I wanted my own laser cutter, but I always thought they were really expensive. Someday, I searched on eBay for a cheap laser cutter and -surprisingly- found the very interesting offer: 40W laser cutting and engraving machine, 650€, USB Port, but from a Chinese manufacturer.

After many hours of web research on this machine, I just bought it. It was not an easy decision, because some people described the laser as "nightmare" or even "catastrophe". But the seller promised superior quality, best customer support and a long return gurantee. I didn't believe all of this, but I thought: "There is not really much you could do wrong for this price, I pay via PayPal and on Youtube you can see these machines running perfectly."

I have the lase now for a few days.

My aims for this blog

My goal is to help you with your decisions, if you are deciding to buy the same machine.

I will share samples and projects in as many file formats as possible. I work with CorelDraw x4 so i plan to upload .cdr files, but also Moshidraw files and PNG or BMP pictures.

I will report any problems I have with this machine. And of course how I could fix them.

If you need help, you can ask me. But please keep in mind, that I have not much spare time and it's hard to keep a blog up to date. Please google your problem first, try it on your own or contact the seller first (they are very polite and helpful!)

I am writing this blog in English, so the whole world can read it. It's not my mother tongue and I'm sure you have already noticed this :). Furthermore, it's a good writing training for me.

What you can do

Of course you are allowed to check my spelling and grammar mistakes :). Leave some good comments and share this blog! Remember that this is only the beginning of the blog and that more content will follow soon.

What will follow within the next time

- Unboxing and setup
- First impressions (be prepared :))
- First projects
- First problems (machine stopped working yesterday -.-)
- PICTURES and VIDEOS of course!

- in 2013 I plan to replace the lousy controller inside the machine with a better mach3 controller

Thanks for reading this patiently,
Fabian