The Epilog laser is a laser cutting and engraving machine. It uses materials such as wood, Acrylic (Plexiglas) or cardboard. It also has a very powerful raster mode for engraving and etching designs. Any vector design in a PDF file format can be cut out by the machine.

Included features

• Red Dot Pointer
• Air Assist
• Auto Focus
• Integrated Vector Grid
• Integrated Vacuum Table
• Radiance™ High Energy Optics

Ideas and projects

If you are unsure of what to make, take a look at some project ideas or read some guidance created by our Fab Lab network.

General hints and tips

• On the first cut of the day the laser needs to warm up so watch job and when laser starts emitting, stop job and restart it to get a complete job
• The laser default home position is 0,0 on the bed so you don't always need to change home position

Material hints and tips

• Keeping the backing on acrylic stops the mesh burning the back of the sheet
• It is strongly encouraged to do early cutting runs in corrugated cardboard.  It's cheap, easy to mark with a pen and hack with a knife and environmentally sound.
• Light materials (e.g., cardboard, thin plastic, paper, and vellum) generally need to be taped down to the laser cutter bed with masking tape. Otherwise, vibration and the air displacement of the moving cutter head will move materials during cutting. It's worth noting that the laser cutter beam has a finite width, which changes both as a function of the material, and as a product of its depth within the material.  The cut width will be wider at the upper surface than at deeper locations within the material.  This can significantly influence the fitting of laser-cut parts, especially for press-fit joins.
• Also check the thickness of the material, some seem uniform but there can be variances across the sheet which also affect press fit parts.
• When cutting wood both the density and thickness affect the laser's ability to cut through the material so it is very important to do a small test cut before commencing with your job.

Software hints and tips

• Adobe illustrator files don't like to vector cut. It seems instead of saving a line as a stroke with thickness 0.01mm, it saves a line with a stroke, fill, stroke i.e |fill| with a stroke thickness of 0.01mm. Lots of ungrouping is needed in inkscape to resolve this.
• Check opacity 100% of line style

Technical details

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