SORRY TWEAKIE I DIDNT CHECK UR PROFILE BEFORE I SENT LAST POST... I GUESS YOUR AVATAR MADE ME STEREOTYPE YOU ...

DAVE

Thanks Dave,

I'll check it out.

Jen

No worries Dave 

I think we would all appreciate it if you use the caps lock key though.
Thanks,

Tweakie.

Good Morning,

i wrote to the folks at Rofin, that stuff looks a bit spenny but you never know. i do not think that kind of power will be necessary to cut a thin laminate, but it could not hurt to have extra capacity. If i decide to go with a laser i would prefer a purpose-built machine as opposed to something i cobble on to a router table. In my humble opine, i feel it would be difficult to take advantage of the speed and almost impossible to control the depth for pocketing without a machine designed to do so.

BTW, i stole tweakies avatar, and use it for my Cisco "WebX" company intranet chat avatar. i think it is pretty "Gender Neutral". 

Jen

BTW, i stole tweakies avatar, 
Jen

Hi Jen,
   You might ask Tweakie for the very fashionable accessory package for "Super Kitty".
There is a "Laser Eye Patch" for first time laser users, as well as seasonal garb including a cool Santa hat.
Cool, 
Russ

 

Tweakie.

btw. The 600W Rofin Fiber laser costs just a little over the price I paid for my house 

Hi Tweakie,

please forgive the plagiarism:P

I figured it was not a cheap device. Like i said i owned a laser aesthetic clinic for a few years. we did skin peels (erbium laser), hair removal (alexanderite & NDYag), tattoo removal (ruby, KTP and YAG) and other stuff like spider veins and age spots. each of those machines were high durability fast switching and very fast switching, from about 3ms pulse width to 10ns pulse width anywhere from about 10-400 joules of output. the cheapest one cost me about 80k and the standard 3 year service contracts were similarly priced.

they all had fiber optic delivery systems, every time i broke a fiber it cost me about three mortgage payments!

Jen
 

Hi Jen,

After spouting on about it I thought I had better try some inlay work. 

This is just wood in wood but it shows that it is easy to do with Mach3 and LazyCam.  http://www.machsupport.com/forum/index.php/topic,12444.msg121416.html#msg121416

Tweakie.

Tweakie, Shoot i replied to the wrong post! see "the laser project" for my comments. Jen

Thanks Everyone!

well the answer to my question Mill or Router has been resolved. the answer is: Laser!   

i have ordered an Epilog "Zing 24". it can cut abalone like butter, gives me a sharp corner with only a .004" radius, will rip thru the thin woods i use when building a stringed musical instrument and has a bunch of other applications like carving or engraving. A few people in my industry are using them with really nice results. One example can be seen here: http://www.rgmusic.com/gallery.html . it opens up a lot of possibilities for additional aesthetic techniques not normally applied to luthery.

I want to thank everyone who put in their two cents regarding this post. You all made me think about my decision process, regarding what direction to take regarding my next machine purchase and to take a look outside of the box. for this i am grateful.

If any of you are interested you can check out the laser i picked at: http://www.epiloglaser.com/zing_24.htm . The only regret i have is the name of the machine "Zing" sounds pretty tacky. This model can be had for around 10-14k, depending on options, their smaller "starter" model in the 7k range. really not much more than low end industrial router.

some of my decision factors were: table size an nice 16x24 inches, cutting speed measured in dozens of inches per minute as opposed to single digit feeds, accuracy close to a low end milling machine, no tools to break, few wear parts, quiet operation, spot size of .005" and ease of use.

These things just use a modified windows print driver you can "print" any common graphics file, like corell draw, dxf etc..., to this driver and it will interpret fine lines as a cut and thick lines or gray scale as a carve. Gee i should sell these things, i'll get off my soapbox.

i guess you can see i am enthused, we shall see what the reality of this thing is like in a few weeks when i take delivery.

Again, thank you all,
Jen