Overview:

Lasercutting is a process where a laser is used to cut or engrave material, typically thin sheet materials. Lasercutters are powerful and extremely accurate, making them a perfect tool for architects, model makers, artists, designers and hobbyists. 

Vectors are essentially coordinate points for the laser to follow and either engrave or cut along.

You can use a variety of programs to design vectors such as AutoCad or Adobe Illustrator. To make sure you’ve setup your file correctly see our setup guide >

Laser cutters work by reading vector drawings to accurately cut out a digital design from your chosen material. We will alter the settings of our machine to reduce any charring or marking but due to the process some extent of this is inevitable.  

Our machine can only cut through certain materials, and to a maximum thickness of 6mm. 

Have a look at our Material List to see some examples. 

You can change the speed and power settings of the laser so that instead of cutting all the way through your material it etches your design into the surface.

On some materials (such as wood) it is possible to create lighter and darker etch lines by varying the speed and power settings for different parts of your design. For some designs, such as very small text, it may be more suitable to raster engrave your design.

Raster engraving is when the laser head engraves by moving from left to right slowly down the material (like an injet printer). This can involve either filling in vector objects or engraving image files like jpegs.

Photographic images should be given a bitmap (halftone) so that they maintain tonal gradients when engraved.