We bought our own laser engraver — here is what we created

MyBroadband recently bought a laser engraver, which has paid for itself many times over.

The original need for the laser came from creating some personalised gifts.

A custom card or item with the person’s name on it helps set gifts apart and make them even more special.

We often use third-party laser engraving services for bulk items like tags, but this becomes more difficult when single items are needed quickly.

After some browsing and comparison, we found a Creality Falcon 2 Pro, which seemed to support our needs.

The engraver features a 22W diode laser, which is strong enough to engrave and cut most materials except metals.

It features an engraving area of 400×415mm and, crucially, fully encloses the engraving area and includes an exhaust fan and vent.

This would allow us to use it indoors without suffocating on the fumes.

Many more powerful and specialised lasers are available on the market, but this seemed like a good starting point for an office machine.

The included instructions made setting up the machine extremely easy. About an hour after opening the box, we were ready to start engraving and cutting.

The Falcon 2 can be controlled by various software packages, as it uses generic GRBL code, but we can highly recommend trying Lightburn.

It offers a free 30-day trial, after which it is paid-for software. The core licence has everything we need for the Falcon 2 Pro.

This software makes setup and editing different projects much easier than the free options we tried.

Our first few days of having the engraver mostly consisted of testing different speeds and powers on various materials to build a database of what works.

We also quickly realised that cutting wood makes much more smoke than we expected.

Even with the exhaust vent going completely outside our building, we had quite a few complaints from neighbouring offices about the smell.

After three moves to different parts of the building and exhausting from various windows, we finally found a spot where the exhaust smoke did not reach any other offices.

For safety, we continually have the laser exhaust vent running out a window. We also have the aircon inside the room on full blast when we use the laser, which keeps the air nice and fresh.

Engraving produces less smoke, and we can run the laser continuously without issues.

Cutting produces more smoke, so we leave generous periods after each cut so that all the smoke can be exhausted before starting a new cut.

Paying more for the enclosed engraver was the correct choice, as running an unenclosed version indoors would be virtually impossible.

The first major project we completed was for a prize wheel used for giveaways in the office and at conferences.

The wheel itself was CNC cut by a third party, but different prize segments were engraved and cut on our own machine. This allows quick and easy modification for different events and scenarios.

As we were approaching the end of the year, we wanted to send out gifts — but with customised boxes for each person.

These boxes are bought in bulk, and thanks to our extensive experimentation early on, engraving a logo and a name onto the front of the box can be done relatively easily.

We also bought some engravable aluminium business cards on Temu, which turned out to be a hit.

The cards are made from a thin sheet of anodised aluminium, which can be engraved quickly, even at low power.

After creating a jig or two to hold the cards, we can now create professional business cards as needed.

We also quickly found open-source software that allows us to create laser-cut boxes of almost any shape and size.

This has also come in handy for lower volume production of gifts, as cutting a box out takes a while.

These have been used for a variety of gifts and projects, as we can generate new boxes as necessary.

This came in handy recently when we began upgrading our mobile data network testing equipment.

We found a few concepts for backpack-based test benches that can easily be used for walk testing in malls, or for our scheduled drive testing.

We tried purchasing some of these existing solutions but were completely surprised by the pricing, which reached hundreds of thousands of rands for a single backpack.

The pricing, combined with the fact that none of these backpacks had all the features we were looking for, quickly led us to design our own, which we could then rapidly prototype with our own laser.

Our network testing team is still testing this design, which has gone through a few iterations, all made possible by the laser cutter.

A new design takes around one hour to cut and build, with around half the time waiting for glue to dry.

This allows us to quickly and inexpensively try new ideas to make the lives of our testing team easier.

While we discover new ideas and projects for the future, the laser engraver has already been an enormous benefit to the office and has seen much more use than we could have imagined.