The Mighty Longer Ray5 Laser Engraver

Page 2 – Construction

This is the part of the review where, having opened up the box and taken my first look at the contents therein, I was terrified. Lots of bolts and washers.

In the end, construction turned out not to be that big of a deal. I had the engraver up and running within an hour with no issues of any kind.

The unit arrived with a full set of Allen keys, a spanner and a brush as well as some wood samples. This is of course fairly standard for such kits.

Longer also included several cable ties – I’ve found a use for two up to now.

My biggest problem was finding a table big enough to handle this 400mm x 400mm working area engraver while putting it together – footprint is marginally larger than my LM2 Pro.

I’m mainly going to show you some photos at this point. I’ll not expand on the quick installation guide as anyone interested can simply get this from the link below along with tons of other information, all in English.

The central gantry came pre-assembled and that’s usually the hard bit. I merely had to assemble the frame (connecting 4 pieces, 3 feet, one control panel), add the gantry, install 2 belts, the control panel and the laser – then finally plug in the leads to the 2 motors and the laser – nowhere near the challenge it first seemed it might be as much of the intricate stuff is pre-assembled – even the cabling loom.

A couple of bolts hold the LCD touch control panel in place, wiring is already done, just 3 connectors to mate and a couple of cable ties to hold it all together.

On the next page I go into detail about using the Longer Ray 5 and with Lightburn over USB and I’ll even touch on WiFi operation but full WiFi operation with Lightburn is not yet possible on GCODE machines such as the Longer Ray 5 and (for example) Ortur engravers…