Greetings! I hope your gathering has been/continues to be festive and that your meal was delicious!

We are forever tinkering here and there are some questions about what the CNC does that a laser does not. This gecko holds some answers. ????

A laser beam points straight down. As you’ve seen, it is unswervingly precise to pin point accuracy. The CNC uses all kinds of different shaped bits and those bits are angled, straight, spiraled, all kinds of shapes that when mounted on the spindle, carve the wood the way a hand held router does. The CNC is driven by software that is similar to the software that drives the laser and in the same way that we use vector files to create our laser projects, the CNC uses them too. Given the mechanical nature of a steel or carbide router bit spinning at high speeds in a spindle, projects take longer on the CNC. Where the laser uses the laser tube to produce the fire that cuts and engraves and depletes itself over time, the CNC bits dull over time and need to be replaced. They can even break.

You can turn your back on a CNC while it’s running, though you don’t want to stray far for very long, where as with a laser you need eyes on all the time. I can’t tell you how many times now we’ve been cutting quilted fabrics for appliqués and they’ve caught fire. Because we never look away, we’ve caught them right away and extinguished them with a squirt bottle. Vigilance is key.

So if you’ll notice the three dimensional aspects of this gecko and the absence of any charring you see the functional differences. We are just starting out with it and have a whole lot to learn, but I thought I’d share this test carve as a more concrete example of the differences between the two.

Dana