Cheap laser engraver

[JohnM]

Originally Posted by Kevin WS

I enjoy Wish and get stuff from there too - often very good stuff at a reasonable price.

Agreed, but there's soooo much cheap tat to wade through in order to find the good stuff.

I've also picked up the odd bargain or two here ... URL removed as it pointed to your account
... but I do really find it amusing to see how high some people will bid for stuff that is\available on Wish at much smaller prices. I guess these people just haven't found Wish yet.

[airdave]

WISH is already well known to be hit and miss.
I'd say you have gotten lucky so far.
There are countless stories of items not arriving, or items not as they were advertised.

Never heard of tophatter...but I stay away from any of those 'bid' sites. Always a rip-off.
Most require you to buy 'bids' to use in auctions.
So the Dollar/Pound amount you see is actually just number of bids/credits.
Often the auction ends up using up all your bids and more...the end price usually translates (bids to cash) to a lot more than you would have spent elsewhere.

On a related story, the latest 'scam' sale making the rounds on facebook and similar places, is for a 'super lifelike plush toy dog'.
Its the same kind of website layout...with lots of photos and videos ripped off from other locations.
The photos and videos shown are all of real miniature "toy" dogs, but purported to be hyper-lifelike dog toys.

Once again, if you purchase you will receive nothing or maybe a crappy toy dog unlike anything on the website!
LOL
be warned...and once again 'if its seems to good to be true...'

[Kevin WS]

Well, I have done OK with Wish - everything came and everything was good value - but as John says you have to wade though lots of stuff to get there.

I have been buying kite flying stuff mainly - more then happy.

[jaffro]

I've been looking at various cheap laser "cutters" for a while now, I'd love to have something to cut out some rivets, bolts and formers/frames for me, or repetitive things like tire treads or tank tracks.

Realistically, assuming you got the "more powerful" 3000MW version, it's probably going to struggle to cut, even thin paper, based on the research I've done. It may cut thinner stuff with a few passes, you'd probably need something at least 5W, and even then it might struggle.

Extremely interested to see how that goes though,I hope you can prove me wrong, keep us posted.

[JohnM]

These things attracted me for their engraving ability, not for cutting card or paper. Although the ads do mention cutting brown paper discs for use as a coffee topping stencil, they do often mention that it is not good for use on metallic, reflective, or white surfaces like paper, so I do not expect it to of much use cutting out paper models.

Personally, I find great satisfaction in snippin' with fine scissors and rarely even resort to a knife unless I really have to. I do appreciate that laser-cut fine details can be useful to many serious modelers, but I rarely indulge in such detailed models.

I have gone for the lower power option, so as long as this engraver will burn the odd scripts and designs into leather or wood I'll be happy. It'll be nice if it will play with plastics too, but the surface of most will probably be too reflective.

Wish.com do list several much higher priced machines which may be worth looking at for cutting purposes, but as I said, this is not a requirement for me.

[romanmodels]

i have a darky labs emblaser it is 4w and will cut white beer mat type card up to 2mm thik with two pares ok but it doses not like gray card .