 Oh, somebody got themselves a laser this week and we'll show you the top 10 things we learned from getting a cheap laser off the internet right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a builder make it? That's what we do on this channel every week. This week, somebody got a laser. If you've been following us on social media, the Instagram, the Facebook, you'll see that somebody picked themselves up a cheap laser off of Aliexpress. Me! Today, we're going to give you the top 10 things we learned from getting a cheap laser off the Aliexpress. So I did a bunch of research and I ended up getting the Vigotech VGL7 DIY laser engraving machine for carving and cutting. It's made out of aluminum but it's got these little acrylic feet, legs, whatever there are, there are two of them. The engraving area was 13 inches by 7.5 inches and that's why I got it because it was the cheapest laser with the largest engraving surface with the most powerful laser that I could find. You have to connect to this machine through one of those little mini USB ports but a cable comes with it. As they come in the box, it comes with frame part A and frame part B, a laser head, two step motor wires, a laser wire, side main control board wire, a USB cable, a power supply, protective glasses, you'll need those, a hardware installation manual, you get a couple of nuts, a couple of screws, a wood block and some paper for testing it on. The number one, the first thing that we learned is this thing is super lightweight, super portable, I could take it anywhere, almost put it in my pocket but I wouldn't because number two of what we learned is there's no safety features. This is just like a raw laser on a rail, just doing its thing. And it uses a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers to 445 nanometers which means that's the blue laser and then the blue laser is super dangerous to your eyes so always wear eye protection. Like no safety features, they say many times in the book that comes with it, safety glasses, don't look directly at the laser, safety glasses. And don't. I did. Don't look at it. Yeah, don't. Don't look at it. The thing is bright, even the reflection is bright. You know when you look at the sun and you see that purple dot for a while, you get the same thing just from the reflection off of wood. So don't look at the laser. Number three, it was super easy to put together. It was literally just six nuts and two wires that you had to plug in. That was it. Then I downloaded some software and found it on the USB cable. Super easy, super easy to install. Number four, because there's no box to it and it's just a raw laser, the fumes get crazy. It's just like if you're burning, whatever you're burning, wood, leather, plastic, foam core, whatever you're burning, it's just like you're taking a torch right to it. Just a very hot torch. So the fumes got a little crazy, but luckily our craft room has these three big windows and we had a couple of box fans. And you have to be a little careful with what materials you use because some materials are toxic and you should not burn them with the laser. We did learn, do not cut vinyl with the laser, we heard it's toxic when you burn it. I don't know if that's true, but I don't want to die trying. Number five, this thing is super fast, way faster than we thought it would be. I've seen them on the internet, on the YouTube, and some of them didn't look so fast. Like I saw that BMO or whatever it was, it had the camera and it looked great and you could line it up, but it would take forever to make those cuts. This thing, super fast. No safety features needed, don't go as fast as you can. No brakes. Yeah, no brakes. Go bigger, go home. Number six, without the safety features and without the brakes, the software was also very basic. It didn't have a camera to line anything up, it didn't have a whole lot of help features, it wasn't very intuitive. The software that this engraving machine uses is the Vigo Engraver L7. No material pre-sets. No material pre-sets. You kind of just wing it. Winging it. Yes. Suddenly winging it. It started to make a cheat sheet about speed and laser power. I mean those are really the two big things that you're worried about, the speed of which it's traveling and the strength of which the laser is lasering. Seven. We just talked about the software, but the imports are pretty great. The file formats that it supports are JPEG, BMP, DXF, and G-Code, ABC123, I was just seeing if you're paying attention. But what we really liked was the JPEGs, you could bring in any JPEG and then you'd be able to outline it, you even do it as like a black and white photo, I like any JPEG you could bring in. And it did pretty good. We didn't need to export it to any SVG, but the problem is it won't take SVG files, so we have a ton of SVG files that I had to convert to JPEGs to try to use. Number eight. I know this is what you've all been waiting for. What can it cut? What can it engrave? It can engrave pretty much anything. It has several engraving modes, it engraves images and text input, it does line scanning, point scanning, grayscale, black and white, and contour carving for those DXF files, that's that vector carving, it's like 3D. It can carve wood, bamboo, paper, plastic, leather, rubber, cork, sponge, solve things like that. And it can cut paper, thin wood under 5mm, non-woven fabrics, foam, foam core under 5mm, can also cut non-transparent plastic sheets under 3mm and black acrylic under 2mm. Now what it can't carve or cut is any metal, glass, stone, ceramic, jewelry, silver, reflective materials and translucent, transparent materials. It does a great job on wood. It does a great job on leather, we tried some luggage tags, balsa wood, it did great. What can it cut? Well, it cut the foam core pretty good, this was 5mm foam core. It cut it on 3 passes at 100% laser power. It also cut balsa wood, I tried it out on some circles, but it can engrave anything. We tried earrings, leather earrings, engrave those beautifully. We tried it on some utensils, some wooden spoons, came out pretty good, not bad. They were kind of wonky when I laid them down, so they didn't come out great. So I tried that one mountain image for the table that we made on a couple of different materials, I tried it on a tiny piece of leather, look at that detail, then I tried it on a little piece of balsa wood, look at that detail, then I tried it on a piece of raw wood that I got from Michael's, look at that detail, things pretty good. We also tried it on something that we couldn't lay down, something that wouldn't fit in like a regular laser. We tried a box that was already made. We just elevated the laser on some 2x4s really, 2x6s, kind of duct taped it down. We're in rock. You know, we're really counting on those safety features to kick in, so safety to the wind, caution to the wind. But it turned out great, and it really etched in there like, it's pretty deep, we'll show you the details. Number nine, the things are crazy detail, there's way more detail than I thought it would be. Now the laser needs to be about five to eight centimeters away from the material so it can focus, and the engraving accuracy is .05 millimeters, I mean that is detailed. So we ran a test, we tried to cut this thing out on the Cricut, Cricut couldn't do it, couldn't do it in balsa wood, couldn't do it in foam core, too detailed. But this laser really got in there, and really cute. You can really see every blade of grass. Every blade of grass, the leaves on the tree, crazy detailed, but to get that detail you actually got to put your hand under here and hand focus this laser to a pinpoint on the materials that you're engraving. So that's, that could be a little daunting, it was hard to see the little thing, especially with the glasses on, so you had to take the glasses off to focus it and then let it go. It was a learning experience. Number ten, we learned that there is a lot of information about lasers and this laser out on the internet. The software is super basic, the laser is super basic, and their website is super basic, but there's plenty of information out there. So what we thought was a 20 watt laser with a 12 inch by 7 and a half inch engraving surface is actually more like a 4.5 watt laser, it's 20 watts going in and around 4.5 watts coming out. So it's not like a super powerful laser, it's just an engraver that's powerful enough to carve some in balsa. Right, it'll cut through this balsa wood, but pick up your live edge over there. Yeah, but it won't cut through this. No way it's cutting through that. We couldn't get it to go through any plywood, not even eighth inch plywood, wouldn't make it through, but this one sixteenth balsa wood went right through, no problem. Foam core went right through, no problem. But again, there's no information or presets on how to use this or what's the best speed or power for leather. You just kind of have to guess and do a whole lot of trial and error and maybe set something on fire. So a fire extinguisher maybe needed. Not saying anybody said anything on fire here or at least that Kim knows about. Oh my goodness. What we really learned is we need a bigger laser with better safety features and a little easier to know where to place that image. Like we really want the camera. We learned that we really want the camera to know where it's actually going to be landing on the material. We know that we need a more powerful laser. We want it to be able to cut through thicker things, had some trouble with leather. We'd really like to be able to cut through leather. I want to be able to cut through plywood. We want some safety features like a lid. Maybe I don't have to wear my glasses all the time and an exhaust fan. So we can breathe and see. So it's a good starter laser. I mean if you need a starter laser, it is a good place to start. I think this was Garrett's method of showing me. I really do need a really big expensive laser. I do. Imagine the things that we could do with that giant expensive laser. Just dream with me for a minute. Alright, do you have a laser? Do you want a laser? Are you allowed to get a laser? Should Kim let me get a bigger laser? Leave a comment down below and tell Kim to get me a bigger laser. She answers all the comments so she'll definitely see these. And we need a giant laser, like one of those 40 watt lasers. If you have one, I'd love for you to show me what you've made with it. Oh yeah. Show her everything that these things can do. And until next week, check out this video, or maybe her video. My video doesn't involve any lasers, but neither does hers. I won't see you guys next week.