CNC Mill - Laser Mounting Plate

The CNC Mill / Laser cutter kit I purchased allows for two methods to mount the laser.

The first is to simply replace the spindle motor with the laser module.  This works well and allows you to use the laser across the full range of the X and Y axis. It's the obvious choice if you're going to use the laser exclusively.  However, swapping the motor with the laser module on even an infrequent basis is a pain.  Also, the spindle housing is 3D printed and will most likely not going to stand up to repeated loosening and tightening of the retention screws.

To support mounting both the spindle motor and the laser module, the spindle housing has two screw hole on the left hand side which line up nicely with the holes in the laser module.  The trade-off here is you're going to lose some travel on the Y axis.  While I'm fine with the reduced travel, I didn't like the failure mode to be "Crushing the laser module against the frame and torquing the spindle housing."

My fix was to mount small plate on the side of the spindle housing to allow the laser to hang in front of the spindle motor (-Y) instead of to the side (-X).  Of course the question was, how do I build that plate?  Given I had a shiny new CNC mill to play with, the answer was rather obvious.

The plate was drawn in Inkscape and cut out from some scrap PCB material using the mill.  Note the SVG file generated from Inkscape doesn't generate specific units in FlatCAM.  After all, it's a Scalable Vector Graphic  not a Fixed VG.  The conversion between Inkscape and mm on this mill is 0.2826.  Using FlatCAM, I simply configured it to scale by 0.2826 to generate the required tool path / G code.

For those wishing to replicate this, here are links to the Laser Mount SVG and Laser Mount G-Code files.