Category: General

Thought I would update our followers on what’s happening with our craft business, our camping adventures and what’s cooking.

After being gone for so long things are slowly starting to get back to normal around the farm. Rita is ordering the material she needs to get back into sublimation. Takes time to get raw material in place. With the happenings of the world it taking even longer. Rita and I are gathering material for what we will be selling.

Working on making sure The Happy Nomads Crafts is officially official. We are getting to a point where we have to keep the feds and our state happy. Again a slow process because of the state of our world at this time and neither make it easy to be compliant.

When I bought the K40 Laser Engraver I didn’t realize what was needed to get it up and functional. That was a real pain. While I still have the K40 Laser, I have moved up to a bigger better CO2 Laser. The K40 will eventually be modified to work with a rotary device so I can add laser engraved mugs and tumblers to what we will offer. These will be customized items for sale (Company logos and such) so you may not see them on this site.

Our RV (The 5th Wheel) is in the capable hands of Bill Plemmon’s RV in Raleigh, NC getting some pretty extensive damage fixed, so we are back to using the travel trailer for a while.

We are getting this site up and functional. Getting ready for a local craft event and getting ready for the 2021 Georgia Mountain Christmas Lights show at the Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds.

I am checking out recipes that I can modify for healthy living and can be prepared while camping.

Stay tuned to these pages for more updates regarding The Happy Nomads.

The Laser Engraver good, bad and ugly

I recently bought one of these devices. It’s a Chinese built (don’t start) 40W CO2 laser. It will cut 3mm acrylic and wood. It engraves, wood, acrylic, leather and a few others. It will not engrave or cut metal. I am good with that; However, it will burn powder coating off aluminum cups and mugs, like the color coated Yeti cups.

There is whole lot to learn to get the most use out of this device and more than a few modifications needed to truly make it useful. It’s a water cooled device so it requires a temperature controlled water feed. Lots of internet chatter on what is best to keep the water chilled. Where this laser is setup the ambient temperature of the room is well below the max temp of the laser. This worked to my advantage. I was able to purchase a chiller that keeps the water at room temp.

It’s a laser cutting through wood. Which means smoke has to be expelled from the device. Since it is essentially drilling out the material the fine particles have to be blown away from the beam. The process also blows out any fire produced by the laser. So I needed a air extraction system. Thanks to legal pot growers I was able to buy a good one at a decent price. An aquarium air pump was a cheap way to blow the particles away.

Then there is the software needed to create the laser cuts and engravings. I am used to using raster graphic programs like Photoshop, but this requires vector graphics. A whole different mindset. JPEG and PNG Images need to be converted to bitmaps. Luckily Lightburn exists and seems to be extremely feature rich and easy to use.

However, once all this is mastered this device can produce some really cool stuff. I am excited about bringing these products to you all.

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