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!We picked up a WKLaser direct from china. Here are some notes..
Ordering was easy enough, $700ish to broker it.
about 6 nuts and bolts came loose in shipping, mostly the doors. half of the locks were stripped at the back, easy to fix. they are standard locks.
One of the mirrors was loose, we replaced them all with II-VI's and realigned everything. The mirrors were dirty out of the factory, the focus lens was covered in black specs (on the topside)
Small crack in the case on the upper front left side where its hinged, the welds gave way. reasonably easy fix.
Airflow seems odd for the suction, not sure yet why the back is open? (ohh for long boards derp)
Poor grounding, the gantry is not properly grounded to the chassis, check it and fix it.
Internal fluorescent burned out after a couple of days (black edges) its a T4 28" tube
Gantry isn't aligned to the table properly or the chassis, cheapy plastic blocks instead, easy to rebuild and fix.
I don't like that home's automatically when you switch it on, but that's a minor thing.
Z table is a bit shonky but it more or less works, its easy to get it out of alignment.
honeycomb/razors just sit on the work table, they can move off and get jammed, double sided tape fixes it but something to affix it would be better.
LaserCut5.3 Software is ok, locked up a few times. bit slow, but easy to use, don't like that it is dongled. installed easily enough on windows, CD's supplied had one scratch on it, and one of the SHX fonts was unreadable but i found it online.
Initially we were going to build our own controller for it, but the leetro hardware seems ok, it needs some shielding though. the current idea is just to write our own printer driver around the leetro DLL's instead.
Also been looking at the reci W6? with the dy20 psu replacement, the machine has a suitable cut out for an extension box. (quoted $1500 plus shipping)
So far its been pretty good, under $4,000K. Pretty happy with it overall, definitely room for improvement but nothing that's been a deal killer, though the grounding needs to be better.
we're gonna get the rotary attachment, though i almost died laughing when i saw some people want $1,000 for it.
tonight we took apart the z table so that we could align it, the hpde/nylon bearings use to lift the table were loose too, so when it changed direction it lurched.
the two steppers to lift the Z table are connected together and driven by one controller.
we took lots of pictures and are going to write a longer post with details on everything we've found and fixed. We will probably replace the entire case since nothing is square or aligned to anything else.
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Last edited by charliex; 06-13-2012 at 03:09 AM.
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Last edited by G.Weike-Abby; 06-11-2012 at 11:24 PM.
Uploading some pics.
The inside of the focus lens
You can see the black specks in this one a little easier, this is day one.
case is cracked at the hinge point. the case is just spot welded together so its an easy fix.
other mirrors, we replaced with the ii-vi's one of them was completely loose, so good idea to a full inspection of the machine before you operate it.
These were loose causing the z table to lurch when it changes direction. The tolerance on the fitting is not great. angle iron to hold the table on.
The design of the Z table is interesting its driven by two steppers that are spliced together from one controller, which means that invariably they'll slip and be out of alignment
there is no bottom limit switch, and the one limit switch doesn't take into account the table height, so head crashes are easy. We're changing this out to a blade off work surface and optical breaker instead
the wiring is neat, the controllers are decent enough, though we'll change those too.
There is some fault in the wiring for the case/chassis/gantry that means you get a shock if you complete the ground path.
the bolts that came loose were mainly the chains that do strain relief with the panels open, the panel locks also stripped since they were probably yanked out during shipping. May not want to ship them locked in future, though they are wrapped tightly in cling film so its hard to see that the panels flapped loose in shipping.
I have a bunch more pictures to write up. More than likely we're just going to build a new frame for the machine, since none of it is aligned then transfer the laser bits into that, also increase the bed size. It'll be an interesting project.
Thanks for the writeup... I will be receiving my LC1290 in less than an hour so Ill be going through all the same soon.
As to controller options I was actually thinking about upgrading the controller with one of these two:
2012 Commercial DSP CO2 Laser Engraving/ Cutter Controller. Support CorelDraw & AutoCad
DSP laser controller, co2 laser controller, diy laser cutter, laser cutter controller
Will eventually be doing more research to determine if its worth the money and trouble of installing or not.
Phil
cool i've read varying things about them, so it'd be good to get some first hand info.
The Leetro DSP based controller seems pretty strange to be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the DSP is being used for , maybe calculating trapezoidal speeds or handling the servo pulses. Everything as far as i can tell gets sent over as individual points.
Got everything setup now and am trying to get alignment... I find it really odd the whole outside of the laser was covered in a thin film of oil though.
Phil
you're lucky ours was like a greased pig, i'm assuming it protects from the sea shipping environment.
Hi Phil,
a "the whole outside of the laser was covered in a thin film of oil though.
" to prevent the rusting during the sea transfer,hope it didn't bring much trouble to you
Best Regards
Lucy Lee
G,WEIKE LASER
han@wklaser.com
I also setup LaserCut 5.5 version software i found on google, and tried that with it, i can't really tell if its any different though, just had to configure it for this laser/controller..