Back in late 2021 I finally tried my very first laser engraver, the Longer Ray5. I was honestly a bit scared of it. One afternoon later it was assembled, and I was engraving wood, steel and even pieces of my own floor without setting the house on fire.
A beginner's first laser
Longer kindly sent me a pre-release unit, and I approached it as a total newbie. I expected a steep learning curve, but the packaging was excellent: every part was protected in foam, there was a USB stick with an assembly video, and the box had everything needed to start. It took me no more than 15 minutes to put together.
What surprised me most were the safety features. For a while I couldn't understand why my jobs kept stopping. It was me! I was walking around filming from different angles, and the machine sensed someone nearby and shut itself off. With five-year-old twins at home, that gave me real peace of mind.
The specs that matter
The Ray5 is a 5 W optical output diode laser with a 450 nm wavelength and a big 40 x 40 cm working area. Focus is fixed: you set the height with a small metal cylinder. Speed goes from 40 to 10,000 mm/min, and the laser spot is ultra-fine at 0.08 x 0.08 mm. It has a 32-bit board, a 3.5-inch touchscreen (something I hadn't seen on an entry-level engraver) and you can work from an SD card, USB or Wi-Fi. I preferred sending jobs from my computer. Besides motion protection, it also has thermal protection that shuts it down if it gets too hot.
I used LightBurn. The USB stick only had Windows software, so I downloaded the Mac version, and it worked beautifully. You have to set your origin, and the "frame" function shows you exactly where the laser will move before you burn anything.
What I engraved
A single pass at 80% power cut cleanly through 2 mm plywood. I engraved a Steve Jobs portrait on offcuts of my cherry-wood parquet at 40–50% power (the PNG I found online had a typo in "stay hungry", not my fault!). A family photo came out a bit dark, so I still need to work on brightness and settings. The question everyone asked me was "can it do metal?" Yes: my logo on a steel spatula came out great, and better still with more power.
Then I pushed it: 1.4 cm of solid pine, maximum power, very slow. I stopped after 25 passes (about 45 minutes) and one corner had gone right through, even with the fixed focus drifting as it cut deeper. For a 5 W laser, that impressed me.