K40 Laser Cutter – Practical projects to take your K40 Laser Cutter to the next level

Having to handle with wood every day with my day-job, I thought I would see what there was in the way of machines that could manipulate wood, or at least turn my ideas into reality. I had been looking at a CNC router (which I have purchased since then) as well as a laser cutter, which I later decided the K40 Laser Cutter would do the job just fine.

Choosing wood

I’ve tried many kinds of wood whilst using the K40 laser cutter and believe to achieve a perfect “CUT”, it’s best to use a softish wood with a maximum thickness of 5mm and a Janka hardness

The wood I chose was Brushbox, which is an Australian hardwood which has a Janka hardness of 9.5, which takes about 3 -5 passes to cut through 5mm thickness wood.

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Although it is a fairly light wood, I prefer using this, otherwise, I would have to cut the wood with either a bandsaw or with my XCarve which takes up a lot more time.

Original File

Second edit / Testing Dithering options for shadows and tones

Final Edit

This is the last edit for the creation of the vector file. All the black areas are #000000 in color and the red line around the outside is red at #ff0000. This will raster engrave all the black areas and cut the line in red. All engraving should be done before the cuts, as the object being cut will dislodge and if you engrave after this, the engraving will become misaligned.

Final Product

Here is the final product made with the K40 Laser cutter