This is great, and the site is beautiful! I'll probably use it in the future for crafty/technical projects. A few questions:
1. I understand the cost is probably based on many factors, like bounding box size, laser time, and material, but it would be helpful to see a table of example items on the home page and their final costs (just to have a ballpark idea of what it would cost to make something of a given size/complexity). For the estimator/order form, why do I need to specify the bounding box size and path length myself? Shouldn't that be inferred from the drawings I upload? All that said, the prices are amazing!
2. Do you ship to the US? If so, does that cost extra?
3. Can you cut steel thinner than 1mm? It would be VERY useful to be able to make steel foil templates for reflow soldering. Such templates act as masks to control the application of solder, and they vary in thickness depending on the application but are most commonly 0.1mm to 0.2mm in thickness. Made by specialty firms, such templates can cost hundreds of dollars. A DIY option would be wonderful.
4. Can you make parts <50mm^2?
5. Your cut edges probably look great. It would be nice to see macro photos of some cut edges to know what sort of quality to expect.
6. What are the tolerances of cut parts?
7. Have you considered merging some of the pages, like the home page and the Discover page? Possibly the design guidelines page? I had to click around quite a bit to answer some other questions I had.
1) This is what another user commented too - having some examples - we'll definitely create a few asap. And regarding the auto-estimation, developing an automated cost-estimating thing would really raise our costs. Let's hope lasergist becomes better and larger soon, and this is number one feature to be developed!
2. Yes we do at no extra cost. And it usually takes no more than a week to arrive to east coast.
3. This sounds like a great idea to try out. With our cutting lasers no, we cannot do this because of heat. But the engraving lasers might be able to do this easily. I'll get back to you about this.
4. Yes - but we wouldn't be very happy to say it nicely. The reason is that too small parts will fall from the honeycomb flatbed and will require some digging below...
4. The laser cutter I operate for my day job (4kW fibre laser) solves this problem with a feature called 'micro tabs' which leaves a small uncut section in the laser path. Parameters are tab length plus minimum and maximum spaces between tabs.
Of course, you then have to break the part free and clean up the micro tab with a file - so more labour intensive, but 99.9% of our customers are industrial so we typically leave that to them.
The Mazaks we have don't have this option but the engraving one does have something similar. You raise a huge point here: industrial vs consumer. There are so many things that consumer-level clients won't be satisfied with.
Just noticed there is a 5, a 6 and a 7!!
5. The micro drone on discover page is just 2" x 2" you probably see it 2x on your screen! But this is a nice tip from a marketing point of view.
6. 0.01mm is the laser spec!
7. You must be the largest fan of one-page designs! Lasergist.com has just 3 pages - but i can understand what you mean!
1. I understand the cost is probably based on many factors, like bounding box size, laser time, and material, but it would be helpful to see a table of example items on the home page and their final costs (just to have a ballpark idea of what it would cost to make something of a given size/complexity). For the estimator/order form, why do I need to specify the bounding box size and path length myself? Shouldn't that be inferred from the drawings I upload? All that said, the prices are amazing!
2. Do you ship to the US? If so, does that cost extra?
3. Can you cut steel thinner than 1mm? It would be VERY useful to be able to make steel foil templates for reflow soldering. Such templates act as masks to control the application of solder, and they vary in thickness depending on the application but are most commonly 0.1mm to 0.2mm in thickness. Made by specialty firms, such templates can cost hundreds of dollars. A DIY option would be wonderful.
4. Can you make parts <50mm^2?
5. Your cut edges probably look great. It would be nice to see macro photos of some cut edges to know what sort of quality to expect.
6. What are the tolerances of cut parts?
7. Have you considered merging some of the pages, like the home page and the Discover page? Possibly the design guidelines page? I had to click around quite a bit to answer some other questions I had.