After several months of fine-tuning our process, we are launching today as Lasergist. Lasergist is easy laser cutting for designers, engineers and anyone who can use Adobe Illustrator or Autocad. And we managed to make it cheap. AND provide free worldwide shipping. And it's 100% made in europe by Japan-made lasers (Mazak) and German/Swedish Stainless Steel.
We are launching with a special 30% discount for HN! Just use the coupon HNSPECIAL
You should probably add HTTPS too, especially for the account login page. Since you are using CloudFlare you can add it for free and this is best practice.
Others suggested this too! Wouldn't do this without permission, so assuming that we launched today and first orders will start shipping Wednesday - maybe by next week we can have some designs featured!
Maybe a few stencil fonts would do the job but common fonts wouldn't work because of letters like R, P, etc. Noted however, sounds like a cool addition.
Just a thought, but maybe it'd be nice to allow people to (optionally of course) mark their uploads as "OK for public use" – using a CC license or something. This way other visitors can see and maybe choose from a gallery of earlier designs. Even nicer would be if people could get a small discount in return…
Imagine a world where, after prototyping something locally on your glowforge, you are then presented with a "order this from lasergist" single-click ordering button :)
Aluminium is an excellent material for printing photos onto, and when I saw this it was the first thing I thought of. Too bad you don't offer that material yet because you could make some really cool art to hang on your wall which would look fantastic and last for a very long time. Here is one example of a supplier with a very limited selection of shapes: http://aluminyze.com/ Now imagine having them print a big skyline photo of a city and shipping it to you to have the sky cut out. It would look pretty amazing, and generating the vector path wouldn't bee too difficult if the image had suitable contrast (or the object in silhouette).
This is a great idea and I wish you guys success, I really do.
I just hope your margins are high enough, or you're doing this on the side your company's main business, because your prices seem extremely low to me. (Also, Mazak over Trumpf?)
I worked for a while (albeit approximately ten years ago now, but still) for a custom fab shop that did a lot of custom business with lasers (for industry, not consumer, generally), and I have a fair idea of the cost of lasers, the stainless you're using, and probable cost of development for the software toolchain you put together for this. And I hope you're using something like SigmaNEST or ProNest and not just chunking down rectangles for your parts, because that would help your costs considerably. It sounds like, from your description, that you are, and that you're using cutouts from other parts to do it, which will hopefully help your costs.
And I would be worried about high-rework costs or low customer satisfaction due to heat issues from people who don't understand laser, or hole locations, etc, etc, etc?
But you probably have already thought of all this, and don't need a random internet commenter to bring it all up. I had wanted to do something like this when I worked at the custom fab shop, but I didn't have the time to develop the toolchain necessary to do it all in 2005-7, so I guess I'm a little jealous.
Thank you russnewcomer! Trumpf are great, based on our experience (~10 years owning and operating several lasers) Mazak have proven to be really reliable and really low-cost in operating kW + maintenance. That's why we kept the Mazaks. Of course we are using a nesting program that's been leaving something close to 200-300 grams. per stainless steel sheet - and this is the core of our low cost.
We tried to explain it as much as possible and give a couple of rules that would save a lot of people from the high heat stuff. It looks that you know a lot regarding lasers and you are more than welcome to stay in touch!
Since you're European, I just wanted to tweak you on Mazak v Trumpf. :)
Again, not telling you how to run your business, but I think you may face a large number of unhappy customers because of poor understanding of how laser cutting actually works. I hope someone is manually reviewing parts before you make them, because it would be bad overall if a LaserGist customer's one-off bad part path caused issues on your other parts, presumably for more regular, high volume clients.
Really, good luck! I just may order something in the near future. Ships by Christmas?
Got it about the Trumpf! Of course we are reviewing every single design and approve/decline designs. We don't want unhappy reviews for sure but the "post-production editing" stuff we do saves the common gotchas of laser cutting. Can't wait to try us out - will definitely be there by Christmas (I guess you are in the States, right?)
Edit: After a bunch of clicking around, I realized I have to initiate an order to figure that out. And I need to provide material, thickness, X*Y dimensions, path length, and a couple of extras to get to hopefully get an estimate.
My feedback: please give me some pricing examples early on. Make it prominent on the start page. Like photos of 2-3 objects, what they cost to make, and what their respective parameters are.
Your comments and experience are very appreciated. As another user pointed this out too, we'll prepare a small example list to be easier to understand pricing.
We are practically focusing on quality but we are doing our best to keep costs low for everyone.
The path length estimate is a bit onerous. You should just compute it server side after the file is uploaded and let the user know what it is and how it affects the final price.
Yeap - It would be really nice to be this way but developing such a feature like "auto-quoting" would really increase the costs. It might be a little bit counter-intuitive at the moment, but hopefully we'll be developing this soon.
not having an automated/instant quote system totally kills my interest in this; compare with ponoko or big blue saw, upload a design and it will very easily give exact prices for your design on various materials.
You mean their own design software? You are mistaken. Ponoko provides templates of their default material sizes, and that's about all that's required. Oh, you also need to use the correct color path to indicate between engrave and cut passes.
Either way, clearly you're already calculating this value for billing, no? Or are you just using laser run-time for the bill, and estimating that based on the user's guesstimated path length?
Don't you have to calculate price for every job anyway (in case the user lied or was inaccurate), or are you actually trusting their input to control pricing?
A basic quoting system was pretty quick for me to hack together: a couple weeks or so. However, the tricky part was handling all the subtly different output formats of different software, corner cases, ambiguous geometry, and plain mistakes people make when creating a CAD file.
I have no idea if it works well, but the SVG spec has a .getTotalLength() method for path elements, which should mean it's possible to calculate the total length in a browser quite easily. A decent JavaScript developer should be able to prove whether it works well or not in an hour or two.
A bit onerous indeed. I've been working in vector graphics for over 15 years and I have no idea how I'd get the total path length for a file. I understand automating this on the server would be likewise an onerous development task, but users are going to need something more than "measure this thing you’ve never had to measure before" to start with.
A quick hack would be to render the outlines to a bitmap. Apply a suitable edge detector that handles filled and unfilled geometry the same and then count active pixels for a ballpark estimate.
With vectors imported into a common data structure you just need to convert curves to line segments with enough segments to maintain a reasonable approximation and then add up their lengths. Cairo and Anti-grain geometry can do the heavy lifting for you there. Anti-grain has example code for doing this adaptively.
In Rhino you can just select a bunch of curves (lines) and type Length<Return>. Since I construct a lot of wireframes I sometimes do a SelectAll<Return>Length<Return> just to see how many feet/miles of lines I've drawn. I thought it was a fun novelty to do that at the end of a project– partly because I don't know how if it would be so easy in other software.
Yes, where's the pricing? And where's the list of available materials and thicknesses? These no-information sites that want you to sign up before finding out anything are seriously annoying.
eMachineShop has offered a similar service for years.[1] But they offer a much wider range of services, and their one-off prices tend to be higher. This new service seems to be aimed more at non-functional decorative stuff.
I disagree a little; sometimes you just want a quick ball-park quote and having to upload a file (which you may not have drawn yet) is an instant turn-off.
That's one, and most importantly, developing this kind of feature "auto-quoting" would raise our costs, and in turn the price. Hopefully, with more orders coming in, we will develop this too. Appreciate the feedback though!
Is this engraving position registration tolerance correct, or a typo? If +/- 3 mm is correct, then it would certainly rule it out for my application (control panels)
Well the engraving tolerance is actually placement tolerance and it's a little bit exaggerated. We have seen so complex parts that it's impossible to have it engraved perfectly. Normally, we overlay the actual product outline including the engraving design and it's aligned perfectly. For your application (control panels) sounds to be extremely easy to be perfect. You can drop us a line at hello@lasergist.com and discuss in detail.
I've used BigBlueSaw as well as some local makerspaces for my waterjet and lasercut needs in the past, and I've been happy with their services. Where does your business fit within that marketplace? Is your advantage pure cost (which I'm impressed with by the way, a $12 shipped part is ridiculous)
Seems like they have much smaller limits on part size compared to big blue saw. Seems like they are mostly targetting hobbyist/art stuff. 300mmx300mm is too large a limitation for bulk work.
I used BigBlueSaw for making frames and parts for some robots I built for fun. They fill a nice gap in that they serve hobbyists but can work with materials and sizes that support beefy, industrial style designs. Conventional machine shops won't give me the time of day due to small quantities and non-recurring orders.
Anyhow, I went home last night and knocked together a little cutting template for some hobby leatherworking I do. At $30 CAD shipped, it's hard to resist trying it out. If I'm happy with the result I'll share the site and template on some leatherworking forums - those guys are always looking for easy ways to build templates. Good luck with your launch.
This is great, and the site is beautiful! I'll probably use it in the future for crafty/technical projects. A few questions:
1. I understand the cost is probably based on many factors, like bounding box size, laser time, and material, but it would be helpful to see a table of example items on the home page and their final costs (just to have a ballpark idea of what it would cost to make something of a given size/complexity). For the estimator/order form, why do I need to specify the bounding box size and path length myself? Shouldn't that be inferred from the drawings I upload? All that said, the prices are amazing!
2. Do you ship to the US? If so, does that cost extra?
3. Can you cut steel thinner than 1mm? It would be VERY useful to be able to make steel foil templates for reflow soldering. Such templates act as masks to control the application of solder, and they vary in thickness depending on the application but are most commonly 0.1mm to 0.2mm in thickness. Made by specialty firms, such templates can cost hundreds of dollars. A DIY option would be wonderful.
4. Can you make parts <50mm^2?
5. Your cut edges probably look great. It would be nice to see macro photos of some cut edges to know what sort of quality to expect.
6. What are the tolerances of cut parts?
7. Have you considered merging some of the pages, like the home page and the Discover page? Possibly the design guidelines page? I had to click around quite a bit to answer some other questions I had.
1) This is what another user commented too - having some examples - we'll definitely create a few asap. And regarding the auto-estimation, developing an automated cost-estimating thing would really raise our costs. Let's hope lasergist becomes better and larger soon, and this is number one feature to be developed!
2. Yes we do at no extra cost. And it usually takes no more than a week to arrive to east coast.
3. This sounds like a great idea to try out. With our cutting lasers no, we cannot do this because of heat. But the engraving lasers might be able to do this easily. I'll get back to you about this.
4. Yes - but we wouldn't be very happy to say it nicely. The reason is that too small parts will fall from the honeycomb flatbed and will require some digging below...
4. The laser cutter I operate for my day job (4kW fibre laser) solves this problem with a feature called 'micro tabs' which leaves a small uncut section in the laser path. Parameters are tab length plus minimum and maximum spaces between tabs.
Of course, you then have to break the part free and clean up the micro tab with a file - so more labour intensive, but 99.9% of our customers are industrial so we typically leave that to them.
The Mazaks we have don't have this option but the engraving one does have something similar. You raise a huge point here: industrial vs consumer. There are so many things that consumer-level clients won't be satisfied with.
Just noticed there is a 5, a 6 and a 7!!
5. The micro drone on discover page is just 2" x 2" you probably see it 2x on your screen! But this is a nice tip from a marketing point of view.
6. 0.01mm is the laser spec!
7. You must be the largest fan of one-page designs! Lasergist.com has just 3 pages - but i can understand what you mean!
How about where it says path length maybe provide the help hint actually show how you can get it from illustrator or inkscape or wherever else you think customers are working from. I've been using vector software for 15 years and I don't think I've ever looked at path length in properties. I'm in the info palette right now with a couple small paths selected, is a plugin required for that information?
Allow me to say that 3mm thick stainless steel is a great thickness for tons of really heavy duty applications. Thicker is an option, and we regularly do cut up to 6mm but we do this only for custom orders as this would really make handling, shipping and packaging become more expensive. If you need thicker or larger parts, just ask!
Also interested in sample pricing, would also like to see some sample designs. This would be really cool to do logos for doors etc at engineering and design firms.
On a non-retina screen, the font weight of 100 looks not so great. I'd recommend to use a media query to check the DPI.
When I saw "Discover" I expected some examples. Your product is intriguing, but I don't think there are that many people that will go "Oh, now I can finally make <insert object>". HAving some examples would be a great way to show what can be done and inspire your customers.
In fact, there is a media query checking for this and changing the font weight to 300. Actually it makes it 100 for retina screens. It's tested and works in several devices - let's check if there is any error in loading the 300 font weight from google fonts though - thanks for the tip.
Your comment on examples is very correct and we've been advised at least 3 more times here; we are definitely doing this soon! Thank you again for your comments.
I have no idea what I'd make with this, but knowing I could have something made this way is awesome :)
Minor grammatical error: "How it works?" is not valid English. Instead this could be "How it works:", "How it works" (with the colon implied) or "How does it work?"
So here is something I want to happen in the future:
You create a CAD design in some open source language making use of parametrised component libraries. You then dispatch the manufacture, assembly and delivery to providers that specify their capabilities via an API, the final product is delivered to your doorstep.
This service is one step towards this, but ideally eventually almost everything would be automated away.
Great work, I've hoped for a website like yours to come out! Like others I've used Big Blue Saw but it's fairly expensive. I recently got parts cut locally (laser cut steel, 16ga) and it's around 20-25$/part (30$/part shipped locally).
From what I can gather from your site for others to reference:
- free shipping anywhere
- 300x300 max size
- 1.5mm: 18.09$ per sheet + 6.96$/1000mm of path length
- 2mm: 22.95$ per sheet + 7.87$/1000mm of path length
- 3mm: 32.97$ per sheet + 9.90$/1000mm of path length
By the way, those prices, per sheet are less than mcmaster sells!!
Only things I would add:
1- add a stainless steel PCB Stencil service (very thin - 0.125mm, but may be not accurate enough?)
2- change max dimensions to 500x300mm (increase of 200mm on one dimension) or 432x300mm (so it would fit in 11x17" envelope).
I mention this because I think I see a revolution coming (laser cut steel sheet) for robotics, 3d printer designs, etc as the manufacturing costs will be so low it does not make sense to buy the raw materials and mill/drill yourself.
In case you are looking for a job, you're hired! haha.. Remarkable comment....
PCB stencil service is something we'll have to try out with the engraving machines - the laser cutters are too powerful for such thin sheets. The max. standard dimensions might be soon changed. (we can already provide larger parts in custom applications)
additionally, I personally believe that what you say is absolutely correct. From a manufacturer's point of view, costs can be low. It's demand + optimisation that keeps them low.
Agreed, most people default to 3D printing. I think that's OK for brackets or joints but cut steel is so much more appropriate for anything larger.
The only thing holding it back is the bending operation, even 1.5mm is difficult to bend by hand with a "real" bender. Most people would not be able to do that operation at home. Solutions?
Too many variables to control and you wouldn't be able to offer free shipping anymore.... you'd have to offer a single bend radius and only 30, 45, 60 and 90 degree angles...
142 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadWe are launching with a special 30% discount for HN! Just use the coupon HNSPECIAL
https://www.heroforge.com/ is one I dig as well.
Will you be offering sheet plastic and/or card too?
https://www.ponoko.com/
I just hope your margins are high enough, or you're doing this on the side your company's main business, because your prices seem extremely low to me. (Also, Mazak over Trumpf?)
I worked for a while (albeit approximately ten years ago now, but still) for a custom fab shop that did a lot of custom business with lasers (for industry, not consumer, generally), and I have a fair idea of the cost of lasers, the stainless you're using, and probable cost of development for the software toolchain you put together for this. And I hope you're using something like SigmaNEST or ProNest and not just chunking down rectangles for your parts, because that would help your costs considerably. It sounds like, from your description, that you are, and that you're using cutouts from other parts to do it, which will hopefully help your costs.
And I would be worried about high-rework costs or low customer satisfaction due to heat issues from people who don't understand laser, or hole locations, etc, etc, etc?
But you probably have already thought of all this, and don't need a random internet commenter to bring it all up. I had wanted to do something like this when I worked at the custom fab shop, but I didn't have the time to develop the toolchain necessary to do it all in 2005-7, so I guess I'm a little jealous.
Good luck!
We tried to explain it as much as possible and give a couple of rules that would save a lot of people from the high heat stuff. It looks that you know a lot regarding lasers and you are more than welcome to stay in touch!
Jim
Again, not telling you how to run your business, but I think you may face a large number of unhappy customers because of poor understanding of how laser cutting actually works. I hope someone is manually reviewing parts before you make them, because it would be bad overall if a LaserGist customer's one-off bad part path caused issues on your other parts, presumably for more regular, high volume clients.
Really, good luck! I just may order something in the near future. Ships by Christmas?
Edit: After a bunch of clicking around, I realized I have to initiate an order to figure that out. And I need to provide material, thickness, X*Y dimensions, path length, and a couple of extras to get to hopefully get an estimate.
My feedback: please give me some pricing examples early on. Make it prominent on the start page. Like photos of 2-3 objects, what they cost to make, and what their respective parameters are.
Your comments and experience are very appreciated. As another user pointed this out too, we'll prepare a small example list to be easier to understand pricing.
We are practically focusing on quality but we are doing our best to keep costs low for everyone.
Either way, clearly you're already calculating this value for billing, no? Or are you just using laser run-time for the bill, and estimating that based on the user's guesstimated path length?
With vectors imported into a common data structure you just need to convert curves to line segments with enough segments to maintain a reasonable approximation and then add up their lengths. Cairo and Anti-grain geometry can do the heavy lifting for you there. Anti-grain has example code for doing this adaptively.
eMachineShop has offered a similar service for years.[1] But they offer a much wider range of services, and their one-off prices tend to be higher. This new service seems to be aimed more at non-functional decorative stuff.
[1] http://www.emachineshop.com/machine-shop/Laser-Cutting-Servi...
For those however that do want to share their parts' photos we provide discount for their next order.
Is this engraving position registration tolerance correct, or a typo? If +/- 3 mm is correct, then it would certainly rule it out for my application (control panels)
If you want other materials and thicknesses, try us out at http://www.bigbluesaw.com/ . For prices see http://www.bigbluesaw.com/examples .
Anyhow, I went home last night and knocked together a little cutting template for some hobby leatherworking I do. At $30 CAD shipped, it's hard to resist trying it out. If I'm happy with the result I'll share the site and template on some leatherworking forums - those guys are always looking for easy ways to build templates. Good luck with your launch.
1. I understand the cost is probably based on many factors, like bounding box size, laser time, and material, but it would be helpful to see a table of example items on the home page and their final costs (just to have a ballpark idea of what it would cost to make something of a given size/complexity). For the estimator/order form, why do I need to specify the bounding box size and path length myself? Shouldn't that be inferred from the drawings I upload? All that said, the prices are amazing!
2. Do you ship to the US? If so, does that cost extra?
3. Can you cut steel thinner than 1mm? It would be VERY useful to be able to make steel foil templates for reflow soldering. Such templates act as masks to control the application of solder, and they vary in thickness depending on the application but are most commonly 0.1mm to 0.2mm in thickness. Made by specialty firms, such templates can cost hundreds of dollars. A DIY option would be wonderful.
4. Can you make parts <50mm^2?
5. Your cut edges probably look great. It would be nice to see macro photos of some cut edges to know what sort of quality to expect.
6. What are the tolerances of cut parts?
7. Have you considered merging some of the pages, like the home page and the Discover page? Possibly the design guidelines page? I had to click around quite a bit to answer some other questions I had.
1) This is what another user commented too - having some examples - we'll definitely create a few asap. And regarding the auto-estimation, developing an automated cost-estimating thing would really raise our costs. Let's hope lasergist becomes better and larger soon, and this is number one feature to be developed!
2. Yes we do at no extra cost. And it usually takes no more than a week to arrive to east coast.
3. This sounds like a great idea to try out. With our cutting lasers no, we cannot do this because of heat. But the engraving lasers might be able to do this easily. I'll get back to you about this.
4. Yes - but we wouldn't be very happy to say it nicely. The reason is that too small parts will fall from the honeycomb flatbed and will require some digging below...
1. Feel free to get in touch if you need help with an auto cost-estimator.
2. Amazing!
Of course, you then have to break the part free and clean up the micro tab with a file - so more labour intensive, but 99.9% of our customers are industrial so we typically leave that to them.
6. 0.01mm is the laser spec!
7. You must be the largest fan of one-page designs! Lasergist.com has just 3 pages - but i can understand what you mean!
No affiliation, just a happy customer.
Just open DOCUMENT INFO palette, select object from the drop down and select your paths. The path length will be shown on that palette.
When I saw "Discover" I expected some examples. Your product is intriguing, but I don't think there are that many people that will go "Oh, now I can finally make <insert object>". HAving some examples would be a great way to show what can be done and inspire your customers.
Your comment on examples is very correct and we've been advised at least 3 more times here; we are definitely doing this soon! Thank you again for your comments.
Minor grammatical error: "How it works?" is not valid English. Instead this could be "How it works:", "How it works" (with the colon implied) or "How does it work?"
This service is one step towards this, but ideally eventually almost everything would be automated away.
- 1.5mm: 18.09$ per sheet + 6.96$/1000mm of path length
- 2mm: 22.95$ per sheet + 7.87$/1000mm of path length
- 3mm: 32.97$ per sheet + 9.90$/1000mm of path length
By the way, those prices, per sheet are less than mcmaster sells!!
Only things I would add: 1- add a stainless steel PCB Stencil service (very thin - 0.125mm, but may be not accurate enough?) 2- change max dimensions to 500x300mm (increase of 200mm on one dimension) or 432x300mm (so it would fit in 11x17" envelope).
PCB stencil service is something we'll have to try out with the engraving machines - the laser cutters are too powerful for such thin sheets. The max. standard dimensions might be soon changed. (we can already provide larger parts in custom applications)
The only thing holding it back is the bending operation, even 1.5mm is difficult to bend by hand with a "real" bender. Most people would not be able to do that operation at home. Solutions?