ACMER R10 Laser Engraving Enclosure Box: My Take...
This is a “review” of the ACMER R10 Laser Engraving Enclosure Box, uncompensated and purchased myself. My desire here is to provide hopefully, helpful feedback and information for users to consider.
It's a decent value for its price range. Its design in its current state pretty much makes it airtight because of its zippered bottom and I didn't have any trouble with it being able to evacuate the smoke. The vent hose extends out to 8 ft, I didn't need to go that far so I didn't test that. The window material is the same color as any of the other protective windows out there so I suspect it's right in line there.
Regardless of window type, it's important to wear protective eyewear without question.
Now that being said, full disclosure here, when I was able to afford doing so I upgraded to a different enclosure and I'll explain why because we need to give them the feedback. Acmer seems to take feedback better than a lot of the other companies out there and wants to improve. They can't do this unless people speak up.
It was very easy to assemble and ready to use in a few minutes. For home use and single jobs it was satisfactory.
Now on to the things that I had to consider and made me upgrade:
- The zippered bottom is very smooth and when used with a honeycomb, the honeycomb tended to shift around very easily to the point of it being too easy. I had to use double-sided tape because even just a slight touch to the workpiece or the honeycomb shifted it and we all know placement and maintaining that position is important during preparation and operation of a cut.
- After a number of jobs, I found having to unzip the base to clean the area a lot more work than I felt it should be. You may consider it a positive because it does contain the debris and it is relatively easy to just vacuum it up. It just didn't work for me the way I do things personally.
- It lacks holes with proper placement to match up with the needs of the machine and I ended up having to leave corners of the base unzipped to allow the power cables and the air assist to be routed outside the enclosure. I made it work, and it was reasonable but I have a little bit of an engineering OCD that was triggered every time I looked at it.
I considered it one of the nicer enclosures for the price range.