Search the Community

After finding out as much as I could about lasers and their practical uses with leather I decided to go with a small diode laser. This video is the first in a series I hope to share with you as I go in finding ways and developing methods and improvements related to leather working and laser. Many reasons along with cost led me to go with the small diode laser to start with and I can honestly say I have been surprised and delighted on my findings so far. The CO2 lasers that at first looked so tempting lost their gleam when I discovered that the tubes that they come with will often fail within 6 months or less and a good quality honestly branded Reci tube will likely cost around a $1000 or more. Another finding is that the small dot of a 2500mw laser gives excellent detail for fine engraving (burning in) and along with a program called 2T Laser it is possible to get a dxf file once done in a decent Cad program to cut with different power and time settings all in the one file. I have had some success with cutting leather be that it takes several passes but for my prototyping work that is now a major time saver. Even the little one shown here can be moved around over the top of a whole hide if you wanted to do it in sections or as can be seen later a very large version I am working on can do larger than poster size and all for a few hundred dollars. (So far). Watch it and comment and follow if your interested to see more.