Our Omtech Max-1393 laser cutter was funded by almost a year of member crowdfunding plus a generous donation from Spirax Sarco. See the blog post - 2026 is the year of the laser
The old K40 laser cutter has been retired and is no longer available.
Class Red Equipment
High risk of injury
See Workshop Safety
Training is required to use this tool
Rule 0. Do not be on fire.
- If you're not sure, don't do it (even switch it on)
- Do not leave the laser cutter running unattended for any reason. See Hackspace Rule 0
- Do not exceed 75% laser power. Run flat out, the tube's rated life drops to around 8,000 hours.
- Donations accepted - 20p per minute of laser-on time (that's £12 per hour, or £1 for a 5 minute job). There's a laser-cut MDF honesty box on the shelf near the cutter.
- 130W CO2 laser tube
- Bed size 1300mm x 900mm, and it will take material up to 100mm tall
- Motorised bed with automatic focusing
- Maximum engraving speed of 600mm/s
- Ruida controller, driven from LightBurn on the PC next to the machine
- Laser cutters can do 3 types of job:
- Cut: cuts through the material
- Vector engrave: engraves the outline of an image/logo
- Raster engrave: engraves (and fills) an image/logo
Please check the sticky notes and material test cards on the PC next to the laser cutter for the latest settings.
In LightBurn, speed, power, number of passes and mode (Line / Fill) are set per layer, so one file can cut, vector engrave and raster engrave in a single job. No layer should be set above 75% power.
Note: used the wrong way, this machine can cause a fire. Please don't use it unless you've had a brief from a maintainer.
- Check the chiller: water level is topped up and the water is clean
- Turn on the water chiller first and let the temperature settle - no alarm should be sounding
- Turn on the extraction fan switch (by the first door when you enter downstairs)
- Turn on the PC next to the laser cutter
- Release the emergency stop, then switch the machine on at the main power switch
- Wait for the head to home before doing anything else
- Open LightBurn with the desktop shortcut
- Open or import your design and assign each operation to its own layer, setting mode (Line/Fill), speed, power and passes for each
- Place your material on the bed and close the lid
- Use the arrow keys on the machine or the move controls in LightBurn to position the head, then use Frame to check the job fits on your material
- Set the focus using the machine's autofocus - it moves the bed until the probe touches your material
- Lid closed, chiller running, extraction running, emergency stop released
- Start the job from LightBurn or with Start on the machine's panel
- Stay with the machine and watch for flare-ups. Pause or hit the emergency stop if anything catches.
DO NOT LEAVE IT UNATTENDED
- Leave the extraction running for a few minutes to clear the fumes before opening the lid
- Remove your material and offcuts
- Close LightBurn and shut the PC down
- Switch the machine off and press the emergency stop in
- Turn the chiller off
- Turn the extraction fan off if not in use by other members
- Log your job and laser-on time, and pop your donation in the honesty box
Bits of burnt material collect in the tray under the bed. Check this before you use the machine, and please vacuum it up to keep it tidy if you see any debris. Take your offcuts home or put them in the scrap bin - don't leave them on the bed.
Mirrors, lens and the autofocus probe are maintainer jobs. If cut quality has got worse, or a job isn't cutting through at settings that used to work, tell a maintainer rather than adjusting anything yourself.
A laser cutter doesn't really cut - it burns. Every job vaporises a thin line of your material and sends it up the extraction, so the only question that really matters is what does this material turn into when it burns? Not how nice it looks, not how well it cuts, not whether it's safe to have in your house.
Be clear that the smoke from burning anything is toxic to some degree - wood, card and leather very much included. That's why the extraction is not optional and why you don't stand over an open lid breathing it in. What we ban is material whose smoke crosses one of these three lines:
- Us. Fumes that do real harm at the concentration one job produces - chlorine gas, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, hydrofluoric acid - or that corrode the machine's mirrors, lens and metalwork from the inside. Both are permanent damage; neither announces itself at the time.
- Our neighbours. The extraction blows outside into a shared area. Something that produces an eye-watering stink is a nuisance complaint waiting to happen, and a complaint could cost us the right to run the laser at all. This is a matter of when, not whether - see below.
- The law. We have duties under COSHH to control members' exposure to hazardous fumes, and fumes or odour coming off the building can be a statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Some materials are simply not ours to decide about.
So the question to ask of a data sheet is not "is this stuff safe?" but "what does it decompose into?". The Manufacturer's Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) is the gold standard - go to the thermal decomposition / hazardous combustion products section and read that, ignoring the rest. Chlorine, fluorine, cyanide, isocyanates or heavy metals in that section mean no.
If a material is not listed below, ask a director or the relevant room lead before use.
Some approved materials are entirely safe to cut and just plain stink - leather and laser safe rubber being the main offenders. Save these for outside business hours. We're here 24/7, our neighbours mostly aren't, so an evening, an early morning or a weekend costs you nothing and costs them nothing either. Avoid 9 to 5 on a weekday for anything you know is going to smell.
Nobody stamps a board "laser safe" - there is no such certification. With sheet material the wood itself is the easy part; it's the glue that decides what the smoke is made of, and there's a lot of glue in a sheet of MDF. So what you're really checking is how much resin is in the board, what that resin is, and whether the board is consistent all the way through. The easiest answer is to buy sheet described as laser ply or laser grade from a supplier who sells for laser cutting, but if you're checking a sheet you already have:
Read this section knowing what the number is and isn't. Emission class measures how much formaldehyde a board gives off sitting in a room at 23°C - it says nothing directly about what comes out of it at the several hundred degrees the beam works at. We use it because it's the only published figure that tells you how much resin is in there, and less resin means less to burn. It's a way of comparing two boards, not a permission slip.
- E1 is the minimum (BS EN 13986, tested to BS EN 717-1: no more than 0.124 mg/m³). This is the normal UK trade standard, so any reputable merchant's ply or MDF should state it on the board, the pack label or the product page.
- E2 is a no - roughly double the formaldehyde of E1. It's rare on the UK market now but still turns up in imported sheet and reclaimed board.
- Better than E1, and all worth paying for: E05 (0.062 mg/m³, half the E1 limit), MDI/PMDI bonded, or "no added formaldehyde" (NAF/NAUF). On imported sheet, F★★★★ (Japanese four-star) and CARB2 / TSCA Title VI (US) are also good signs.
- Careful with "E0" - despite how often it's advertised, it is not a European or British standard and no body certifies it. If a seller claims E0, ask for the actual test data before believing it.
- Note for us in the UK: the tighter 0.062 mg/m³ limit that came in on 6 August 2026 is an EU rule (REACH Annex XVII entry 77) and Great Britain is not covered by it - UK REACH keeps the older limits, so E1 remains the legal baseline here. Plenty of UK mills and merchants have moved to E05 anyway because they also export to the EU, so it's worth asking - just don't assume a UK-bought sheet is any better than E1 unless it says so.
- Board sold in GB may carry a CE or a UKCA mark. Both are valid here, and either way the thing you actually want is the EN 13986 declaration that names the formaldehyde class.
- A board can be perfectly fine to have in your bedroom and still be wrong for the laser - see the grades below.
Judged on what they put in the air, not on how well they cut:
- Moisture resistant (MR) MDF - usually green dyed. Melamine-urea-formaldehyde resins, so more smoke and nastier smoke, plus dirty cuts.
- Fire retardant (FR) MDF - usually red or blue dyed. The flame retardant additives go up in the smoke, and halogenated retardants are exactly what we're trying to keep out of the extraction.
- Exterior, marine or WBP ply - phenol-formaldehyde and resorcinol glues. Heavy phenolic smoke that stinks well beyond our own walls and tars up the lens.
- Cheap "hardwood" ply - the void filled far-eastern stuff. Unknown glue means unknown smoke, and there's no data sheet to check.
- Any board with a melamine, foil, laminate or painted face - you're burning the coating as well as the board, and melamine smoke carries ammonia and cyanide compounds.
- Thin, even, pale glue lines. Thick dark brown glue lines mean a phenolic glue and a bad time.
- Uniform, light coloured plies with no voids, gaps, patches or plugs. Voids are the main cause of flare-ups and of parts that cut through in some places and not others.
- MDF should be an even density right through, with no visible glue pockets or gritty patches.
- Ask the supplier for the data sheet. No data sheet means unknown material - ask the room lead before cutting it.
- Test cut a small offcut with the extraction running and watch it. Thick yellow or black smoke, persistent flames, a sharp acrid smell, or sticky tar building up on the lens all mean stop and take the sheet home.
- Laser rated Ply (not any old ply)
- Laser rated MDF
- Acrylic
- Paper
- Card/Cardboard
- Laser safe rubber (stinks! keep it out of business hours)
- Vegetable tanned leather (stinks, think burning flesh... so keep it out of business hours)
- Felt
- Laser safe Ply (not any old ply)
- Laser safe MDF
- Acrylic
- Paper
- Card/Cardboard
- Laser safe rubber (stinks! keep it out of business hours)
- Vegetable tanned leather (stinks, think burning flesh... so keep it out of business hours)
- Some light coloured stone
- Ceramic. Note, requires Dry Moly spray
Metals are currently not allowed on this machine, including marking stainless steel or aluminium with Dry Moly or CerMark. Ask a director or the room lead if you need to mark metal.
This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some common materials which cannot be laser cut, either because of the toxic fumes released during cutting or because they're a serious fire risk. If it isn't on the approved list above, ask before you cut it.
These release hydrochloric acid and chlorine gas. That's bad for your lungs and it corrodes the machine from the inside out, so a single job can do lasting damage.
- PVC, rigid or flexible
- Vinyl, sticker vinyl and vinyl banner material
- Faux/PU "leather" and vinyl upholstery fabric (nearly always PVC backed)
- Foamex, Cintra and other foamed PVC board
- ABS - gives off cyanide and styrene, and melts rather than cuts
- Polycarbonate / Lexan - absorbs the beam, discolours and catches fire
- PTFE / Teflon - gives off hydrofluoric acid
- Polystyrene and styrofoam - catches fire almost immediately
- Polypropylene foam - melts and catches fire
- HDPE, milk bottle and chopping board plastic - melts into burning goo
- Fibreglass, carbon fibre and epoxy resin composites - the resin binder gives off toxic fumes
¶ Treated, coated and unknown materials
- Pressure treated or tanalised timber - contains copper and arsenic compounds
- Chrome tanned leather - gives off chromium fumes, so vegetable tanned only
- Melamine faced board - gives off formaldehyde
- Mirrors and polished reflective sheet - can bounce the beam back into the machine
- Anything with an unknown coating, adhesive, laminate or backing paper