Tested starting settings, honest tutorials and plain-English safety guidance for diode, CO2, fibre and UV lasers. Written for your first coaster and your thousandth commission.
The test grid is lesson one here. Ten minutes of scrap beats an hour of guessing.
Diode, CO2, fibre or UV — each wavelength has strengths and hard limits. Two minutes here saves you buying clear acrylic for a diode. See what yours can do.
Every machine, lens and material batch is different. Our first tutorial teaches the one habit that makes every setting on this site work for your machine. Tutorial 1 →
Coasters, keyrings, a chopping board, your first metal mark. Ten projects, each teaching one skill you'll use forever. Pick a project.
Choose your laser type and material. Every entry states its reference wattage — scale carefully, test on scrap, adjust one variable at a time.
These are starting points, not gospel. Wattage, lens, focus and material batch all shift the sweet spot — the test grid finds yours. Anything marked with a caution flag has prep or safety notes you shouldn't skip.
Each one follows the same shape — what you'll make, what you'll need, the settings, the steps, and the mistakes everyone makes so you don't have to. Numbered because the order matters: each project builds a skill the next one uses.
Some materials will poison you, corrode your machine, or both. There is no safe power setting, no safe small piece, no safe single cut for anything below. When you can't identify a material, it belongs on this list too.
Roughly half chlorine by weight. Lasering it releases chlorine gas and hydrogen chloride, which becomes hydrochloric acid in your machine and your lungs. Hides in sign vinyl, HTV, banners, faux leather, some craft foam and wire insulation.
laser-safe PU vinyl, cast acrylic, paint maskingReleases hydrogen cyanide, melts into flaming goo rather than cutting. Found in LEGO, 3D-print filament, electronics cases and toys.
cast acrylic for laser parts; 3D-print ABS insteadAbsorbs IR so strongly it's what laser windows are made from. Yellows, catches fire, gives off benzene-related fumes. Regularly mistaken for acrylic.
cast acrylic — denser PC sinks faster in water if unsureReleases toxic chromium compounds, including hexavalent chromium — a carcinogen. Most fashion and upholstery leather is chrome-tanned.
vegetable-tanned leather from a supplier who states the tannageFine glass particles plus toxic resin fumes; carbon composites delaminate and their resins can carry cyanide-bearing byproducts.
machine mechanically or waterjetMystery plastic, unknown coatings, "wood" sheets with resin faces, galvanised or plated metal of unknown origin. Recycling code #3 means PVC. No SDS, no cut.
ask the supplier for a material spec or SDS — or walk awayEngraveThis exists because the settings that actually work live scattered across forum threads, PDFs and other people's memories. We collect them, test them, state the reference wattage, and explain the why — so a complete beginner and a production shop can both leave with what they came for.
Built in the UK, free to use, and honest about the one thing every settings chart on the internet glosses over: your machine is not our machine. That's why the test grid is tutorial one, and why every number here is a starting point with its provenance attached.