Top 10 Frequently Asked Laser Questions from Epilog Fans

First, remember that not all glass is created equal. While you may think you need more expensive glass to get a great engraving, that’s not always the case. Many of our customers use glassware from restaurant suppliers or dollar-discount stores, both of which engrave beautifully.

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We’ve also developed the following tips that help ensure a nice, frosty engraved finish:

• Using a lower resolution, around 300 DPI, produces a better result on glass as you separate the dots you are engraving.
• Change the black in your graphic to 80% black to improve the engraving quality.
• Running with a Jarvis dithering pattern in the driver (you’ll find this under the raster speed and power settings) will also help provide a smoother finish.
• Some people find that applying a thin, wet sheet of newspaper or paper towel a little larger than the engraving area also helps with heat dissipation and improves the engraving. Just be sure that there are no wrinkles in the paper after it is applied.
• Using your finger or a paper towel, apply a thin coat of liquid dish soap—any kind will do—over the area to be engraved. That will dissipate the heat when engraving.
• Polish the area with a ScotchBrite pad or something similar to eliminate shards of glass.

Generally speaking, this material is cut with a laser more than it’s engraved. For engraving, we’d suggest starting with the recommended wood engraving settings in our manual. Plywood can be tricky and inconsistent in terms of cutting, due to the various layers of glue found within it. Balsa seems to cut very nicely and many of our customers use this medium to build various types of models.

This is going to depend on your machine and wattage, but we’d start with the recommended settings for “leather” in Epilog’s user manual. When in doubt, start with a relatively high speed and low power. If you don’t move the item being engraved, it is easy to add a little more power or reduce the speed and run the job again until you get the look you want.

Scrap materials are great not only for creating new projects, but also for use as practice pieces for more challenging engravings, such as photographs. We’ve seen customers make all kinds of things from scrap, such as small acrylic edge-lit signage, ornaments, name tags, and lots more!

Yes! Epilog’s current product lineup can be used with Mac Operating Systems. Our Pulse app lets you connect the laser to your device in one of three ways: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB. Once you connect your device you can open a web browser window, type in the IP address of the laser, and hit enter. The app loads automatically, and you can then import various files and send them to the laser for processing. If you have a legacy system, we recommend using Parallels or Bootcamp to power the lasers from their systems, or simply purchase an adequate PC and dedicate that machine only to the laser.

The biggest piece of maintenance advice is to keep your system clean, especially the optics. Clean optics help ensure that your laser produces the most precise engraving and cutting results. Other maintenance activities will depend on the model of your machine and are included in your owner’s manual. You can also find maintenance videos in our online training site and knowledge base.

This is where scrap materials come in very handy for testing speed and power settings, experimenting with different resolutions, etc. Many of our users go to the big home improvement stores for inexpensive wood and tile (ceramic, marble, etc.) to test and play around with. Thrift stores are also great places to find lots of different low-cost substrates to experiment with. Additionally, “dollar store” retailers often have glassware (pint glasses, wine glasses, beer mugs, etc.) that engrave beautifully.

I’m sorry to write such an all encompassing post. I have a few questions and would appreciate any help. I’ll try keeping them simple:

1. As a newbie, with no background in CNC’s, is this easy to get up and running? I know that’s not a straightforward question, as everyone has different strengths, but I’m just looking to get some opinions here.
2. How deep does the laser cut?

I was on the fence between a laser cutter and a CNC and decided on this. There are some smaller cheaper options, but ultimately, it seemed like this would be more of a machine that I can learn and grow to do signs, etc. Anyway, I would much appreciate some answers, thanks in advance!

Welcome to the club Digitalmaster!

Want more information on laser cutting machine software? Feel free to contact us.

The machine is probably the easiest on the market to assemble and get running. It is just the software (learning curve) I found most challenging.

I’ve learned that this forum is chock full of experts (though I’m sure most don’t consider themselves as such) who are sources of great knowledge when needed.

I’ve not been involved with laser work yet so, hopefully, others will chime in on that.

Thanks for your response! I’m probably going to go another route for the laser anyway, but do plan on ordering this… I’m more worried about the software, as you mentioned that’s the more difficult part. I’m proficient in Illustrator, so not sure if that helps much.

I think having the Illustrator background can only help. I find the Computer Aided Design (CAD) portion comes easier to me (also new to CNC) than the Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) portion of the software. The CAD part you need to design very accurately what you want to create while the CAM part you are telling it How to create it, what size cutters to use, the nature of the tool path for the machine to follow etc.

This forum and you tube is your friend, there are lots of tutorials available for all the popular CAD/CAM software.

Welcome aboard

Hello @digitalmaster - welcome to the forum! As Phil said, the machine is dead easy to set up. The learning curve for the CAD and CAM can be very steep and difficult for some. Since you have time before your machine is delivered, you should have time to get familiar with all the jaron. There is a post somewhere here with some acronyms. And I’ll add a shameless plug for my CNC 101 series

As for the laser, it is only 7.5watts, so more burn than cut. You can cut paper and cardboard and very thin wood, but that is about it.

@digitalmaster You’re going to find a lot of similarities with Illustrator and most cad/cam packages. Rather than reinventing the wheel, they tend to use a very similar range of commands. The most popular in this community is the Vectric Vcarve, of which there are two versions, Desktop and Pro. The biggest difference is the Desktop version is limited in size to 24" x 24" , while the Pro version is only limited by the size of your machine, although with tiling even that is not a limit. Don’t repeat my mistake , bone up on the software while you wait for the machine to arrive. As @cyberreefguru said, there are many videos to help you out. The software is available as a free trial download, you can learn on it but you won’t be able to download or run toolpaths. Welcome to the forum.

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