Sorry, maybe it was not clear in my mail but I do not want to start a businnes in 3D printing with the Snapmaker, I want to print, engrave or laser stuff for my existing business.
For example to engrave the logo on things we use for our business like the wooden tablets.
Some of these are however larger than the 12x22cm bed and therefore I wanted to check if someone has experience and advise with engraving or lasering stuff that may stick out of the bed, especially in relation to the moving parts.
If you’re looking to engrave stuff there are better laser engravers. A CO2 laser is likely better for commercial products. It’s much faster, and cuts a wider range of materials, for example it can engrave glass and acrylic easily with no modification to the substrate. Additionally CO2 lasers behave different with wood - they ablate to a depth rather than charring and darkening like diode lasers - which is better is up to what you want to do.
For CNC there are also better dedicated machines.
If you see yourself going back and forth frequently between the multiple modes, keep in mind the changeover time and recalibration between processes is not instant. I don’t have a good number in mind, but it’s certainly longer than having separate machines set up for each purpose.
I understand there are better machines dedicated to the different functions of the Snapmaker, but in the end I assume they will cost more, will take up more space en may require different skills and applications to produce decent output.
Again, maybe in time when we have explored the possibilities we might move on to dedicated machines which may provide better results, features and flexibility.
Everything you asked in your original question is possible. It will require jigs for precise alignment, and will likely take a day per part engraved (at the start at least) unless you get an efficient workflow going to batch produce parts. SDJ here on the forums is the only person I’m aware of regularly doing multi-process parts with CNC and laser, he has a nice writeup on how he does it here: Some info on cnc tool changes and combo cnc/laser projects
It’s possible, but understand that the machine you order will show up, and it will require many different skills and applications to produce decent output. Usually we’re using Fusion360 for modelling and generating CNC toolpaths, Lightburn for doing laser. Luban technically can do some things, but dedicated pieces of software for each process will give much better control over the results. There are of course many other software packages outside just those two.
I think some of the answer would depend on how much larger than 12cm x 12cm the work piece is.
Keep in mind that the bed is only about 1cm away from the Z axis. If the work piece hangs off the bed to the left, you’re going to loose some of your Y range or have a collision.
Because of the clearance, I wouldn’t try to work anything larger than 16cm x 16cm (the clamps take up some of the working surface). You might be able to get up to 25cm x 25cm if you design your own work and clamping system. Also because of the clearance and cables, I think the work would need to be indexed from the back left corner, not the front left corner. Not difficult, but it’ll add some extra mental effort to the the layouts and rotations to cover the whole surface.
Laser would probably work better than CNC. CNC should be very well clamped. Only clamping on the left and back of the object (so it can hang over the bed on the front and right) might cause the work piece to rotate or slip. You could probably mitigate that with a custom clamping system, but it would take some trial and error.
As long as the material can be orientated to allow the machine to work without collisions or binding. I carved some lamp shades for my foosball table. These were about 6-8" wide but 4’ (feet) long. It was a bit of a pain and being a newbie myself. It didn’t come out perfect, but I think it looks pretty cool.
I have the A350 and the enclosure. I opened the front door and took of the back pane of the enclosure. I thought I could just let the excess hang off because it was not too wide just too long. Ran into issues with keeping the material level even with it clamped, over half of it was hanging off the bed. I had to engineer a support of sorts that also would let the material slide smoothly with the bed. Once I had this working on one side of the machine, I decided to run it all from the one side. This made it hard to align the two words because I would have to pull the material and rotate it. I also found out after starting that when you change the letters by scaling it messes up the font reference. Long short, it was tedious, needed a bit of planning, but doable even for this newbie.
) the higher cost is in line with my goals and ideas.