After waiting for months for the arrival of my SnapMaker 2 A350, it is finally here. Very excited to try it out and the assembly process was a breeze. Of all the 3 functions, 3D printing, CNC and laser cutting, my passion lies with laser cutting, my first set up was the laser cutting/engraving module.

Loading my svg file into the provided software SnapMaker Luban, converting to G-Code and sending the file to the machine via WIFI was effortless.

So I began my first laser cutting process. With the provided safety goggles on, I can see the sparks of the 1600mW laser right in front of me and the smoke coming of the cutting process was rather choking, probably will need to invest on the USD599 enclosure module to be safer at home before burning my house down with this class 4 laser.

After 8 passes of full power on my 3mm plywood (rather slow), my first laser cut project was completed. Removed the piece, and to my disappointment, the laser was not powerful to cut through my 3mm plywood fully, some areas were ok but the finer details were still un-cut. Rather disappointing. Decided to go back to the drawing board to find a way to solve this issue.

I decided to generate the g-code of the reflected cut lines and run through the plywood on the other side, probably not the smartest idea as the cutting platform did not come with any ruler or sorts. I need to manually align the plywood using the manual mode on the machine to do that. As I am using this round to go through another pass on the other side, I only done 2 passes for this.

After 20 minutes wait, the cut on the other side is finally done, managed to complete my project, but it took me 4~5hrs just to cut this 50mm x 50mm project, and the finishing was only so-so.