Guys I am interested in getting into checkering wood and engraving leather with a small laser engraver.

Mostly wood parts to be checkered and small logo designs put on them. These parts are small.

6 tall max , 3 wide max for 99.9% of the parts. Yeah I am sure I ll toss a bigger piece up there to make a plaque or something like that. But my main concern is small parts that roughly measure 1 1/2 x 4".

So basically what I am interested in is this.

1 Would a laser such as this work for me ?

Engraver

This will be hobbyist type production use. So it wont be used as a industrial production setup to start, but down the road it will be used as a more consistent setup.

Obviously money is an object, and this is all new, so a learning curve on a cheap setup would be nice.

I know 75 % of the work is probably related to the software, and the other 25% is done by the machine in terms of just hitting a button and watching it work.
But that 25% is all new to me. So I am curious as to being able to do radius edges.

For starters my part is .200 " tall. I would like to checker this to look similar to something like this.

These aren't the grips, but the same general idea, where some of the checkering will roll over the radius edge a little.



So I guess I am just looking for some ideas of what I should look for. This isnt a $10,000 budget. More like a $1500 budget to start with. I can probably throw a tiny bit more into it. But thats honestly about all I can do. I am checking feasibility to just have someone else do it. But the time factors of waiting on them and being able to do it myself and do custom designs appeals to me more.