I created a video with instructions in order to change out my blue laser to an IR laser without having to do to much work when changing over to do metal engraving from wood working on my Fox Alien 4040 XE Pro. LaserTree R2 2W IR 1064 nm conversion on a Fox Alien 4040 XE Pro with a 40W 450nm blue laser. Let me know what you think.
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I think it’s a nice and useful project, congratulations on it. The only thing that is (always) a problem, is the mass of the laser head itself. That will limit the speed of the machine. On the other hand, I just worked again with a 10 Watt Longer Ray which is limited from the factory to 6000mm/min max speed and it also works ok.
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I agree and that weighed into my decision to do this conversion.
The Fox Alien head, for lack of a better term, weighs more that the Lasertree conversion that I changed it to. I removed the orange mount for their laser which is also used for their CNC motor and it is large and heavy. That and the 4 bolts used to hold it in place adds a lot of unneeded weight to it.
Getting rid of that saved a lot of weight. They could have designed it much better.
If I had another backing plate like the one on the Lasertree R2, I would find a way to mount it to the back of my Fox Alien 40W diode laser instead. I may just print one on my 3D printer to use. The other pieces that I designed (vacuum tube holder and vacuum pickup) weigh basically nothing as they are done in PLA. In addition, having the Vacuum tube holder lessens the mass effect by holding the vacuum tube in a specific place instead of having it flop around while the laser is moving.
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I decided to make my own part to get rid of even more weight on the cross axis. I made this short video showing what was done.
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