Your First Days With a New Laser (Step One: Don't Use the Free Software)

The crate's unpacked, the ducting's run and the chiller's filled (if not, start with our setup checklist). Now comes the part that decides whether this machine earns its keep or gathers dust: your first days at the controls. Here's the path we'd give a friend — the same one we teach, minus the shortcuts you only learn the hard way.

Day one: choose your software — this is the big decision

Every machine ships with a free program called RDWorks, and we'll be blunt because we wish someone had been blunt with us: it's awful to learn on. It's dated, clunky and fights you at every step. Plenty of new owners spend their first weeks blaming the machine when the real problem is the software.

Use LightBurn instead. Think of it as a simpler version of Adobe Illustrator, built specifically for lasers — you design, arrange, set your power and speed, and send the job to the machine, all in one place. It's intuitive enough that complete beginners are running jobs within the hour, and deep enough that we still run our entire production through it years later.

The practical bits: there's a fully unlocked 30-day free trial, so you can start today for nothing. When you buy, the CO2 machines we run use Ruida controllers, which means you need the LightBurn Pro licence — around $199 at the time of writing (LightBurn prices in US dollars), bought bundled with your machine or direct from lightburnsoftware.com. It's the best money you'll spend after the machine itself.

Day one, part two: focus and frame

Before any design work, learn two physical habits. First, focus: set the distance between lens and material with the focus gauge, every time the material thickness changes. A perfectly good laser with bad focus produces weak, fuzzy cuts that get blamed on the tube. Second, frame: the button that traces the outline of your job on the bed before firing. Use it on every single job — it's the difference between a perfect placement and an expensive piece of scrap.

Speaking of which: this week, cut nothing you care about. Scrap only.

Day two: run a Material Test — the habit that changes everything

This is the feature that makes LightBurn worth it on its own. Built into the software is a Material Test tool that burns a labelled grid onto a sample, varying power one way and speed the other. Ten minutes per new material and you can see exactly which combination gives you a clean cut or a crisp engraving — on your machine, with your tube, on that material.

This matters because settings copied from forums and Facebook groups rarely transfer; every machine, tube and batch of material behaves slightly differently. Run the grid, save the winning numbers into your LightBurn material library, and within a few weeks you'll have a settings library that's a genuine business asset. (This is one of the things we spend the most time on in our training, because it pays back forever.)

Days three to five: engrave first, cut second

Engraving is more forgiving than cutting, so start there — a coaster or keyring on scrap, taken from design to finished piece. Then move to cutting, changing one variable at a time. If a cut isn't going through, check your focus and clean your lens before you reach for more power; nine times out of ten, that's the fix.

The habits to start on day one

• Never leave the machine running unattended — laser fires are rare but real.
• Air assist on, always.
• Know your material before you cut it — never PVC or anything containing vinyl.
• Start the cleaning routine now: lens and mirrors weekly. It's a big part of how our machines have run thousands of commercial hours.

Or skip the learning curve entirely

Everything above is roughly the first week we compress into two hours of hands-on training — setup, LightBurn, dialling in settings and materials — in person at our North Wales workshop (about 8 miles from Chester) or by video call with your machine in front of you. And if you haven't bought yet, come and watch our machines run real jobs at the showroom first — our discount code will save you 4% when you do order. Questions at any stage? Get in touch.