by sshwarts » Fri Mar 18, 2016 12:51 pm
Hi and welcome. To answer your questions, no, there's no longer any kits. The originator of the design, Bart has moved on to bigger and better things. However, some of the members of the forum have taken on making some of the metal parts and selling them here. As for the plastic parts, a 3D printer can be utilized which you can job out easily on places like 3dhubs or makexyz.
While you can find some great prices from china suppliers on eBay for example, for most of the heavy lifting parts (laser tube, optics, laser power supply, DSP controller, steppers, etc) I bought from the US suppliers like lightobject, inventables, etc. While many of their components of course source in China, they stand behind them. For things like electronics power supply, switches, etc, eBay is great.
Building a laser is exciting and fun but also a good challenge. You want to eliminate as many, of what I call "ghosts" as possible. Many of us have chased problems for days just to find that the component we got for cheap was what we paid for.
A laser cutter/engraver is a different tool to a 3d printer so one doesn't replace the other. In fact, I find they compliment each other quite well.
Scott