I have been building flying RC Models (balsa) since the mid 70's. I am very interested in communicating with anyone knowlagable of the equipment and software used to Lazer cut balsa and light ply. I am retired military (NAVY) living in central Florida ( the Orlando area) I am originally from Northwest Indiana. I t would be great to find someone local to show me the ropes and to talk building. I worked in the airplane section at an old school Hobby shop here in central Florida. Getting paid to talk to about flying models all day was amazing!. I would field calls from builders all ove rthe country! I particularly enjoyed talking to many kids getting started in the hobby. very few were at all interested in building. Most of them were looking for BNF and Plug-N- play foam planes with built in stableization electronics. Well most of the adults too! Anyway I really want to get lazer cutting.! Hoping to hear from some builders. I have not yet become familiar with th Forum, is there a section for builders?

The hardest thing about using lasers is choosing and learning a piece of CAD software. It can be pretty intimidating because the user interface can seem pretty complex. What I have found for myself, unless you really get into designing is that you dont actually need a lot of the bells and whistles found on a lot of CAD programs. Once you can trace an item and do some basic editing you are ready to start cutting. You have a few hours of steep learning curve and then little bumps as you discover new things that you want to do. I use A9cad and Inkscape as they are free, relatively simple and in the case of Inkscape there are online tutorials. I have one of the Chinese K40 CO2 lasers. They cut well and have enough power but need some modification to get the most out of them. There is also the matter of setting up water cooling. For a person starting out I would recommend one of the diode lasers that have come out since I bought mine. Even with the diode lasers you will still want some sort of enclosure for handling smoke and other fumes. There is a CAD forum on this site. There are also websites aimed at makers that are laser focused. there are even some facebook groups.

Thanks Matt.......

I almost forgot, many people use Lightburn as the software to talk to the laser. I use K40Whisperer but that was the hot ticket when I got mine and it is generally specific to that family of lasers. . The main point is that the software that comes with pretty much any of the made in china lasers isn't great and may in fact be buggy.