Two weeks of the xTool S1 40W laser engraver in a kitchen with no cupboards

The xTool S1 40W laser engraving machine, the rotary bundle, model MXD-K101-001, has spent two weeks in what will eventually be the kitchen, cutting drawer fronts from 6 mm ply and labelling every jar I own while the room has no cupboards to put them in.

Price wise it sits under a Glowforge Pro by a good margin and over an OMTech 50W CO2 tube machine, so it's the premium end of enclosed diode lasers. I tend to open things up before I trust them, and this one I opened on day two to see how the rails were built.

The box. Marketing photos make it look like a printer. It arrived on a pallet at 86.8 pounds and needed two of us to get it through a doorway that still has no door.

Enclosed, which is the point, the lid interlocks and the smoke stays inside until the extraction fan pushes it out the back port, and the flame detector has tripped once on a piece of ply that was def too resinous. Bed size is 23.93 by 15.16 inches, big enough for a drawer front in one go, and the rotary bundle handles tumblers and the odd bit of pipe. Speed on paper is 600 mm/s for engraving and it legit hits that on light raster work, cutting 6 mm ply is more like three passes at a crawl. Clear acrylic it will not cut, diode wavelength goes straight through, so that job still goes to a CO2 engraving machine.

Setup took an afternoon, mostly the software and the frame levelling, and the auto focus pin is faster than any manual gauge. Noise is the fan, a steady roar you can talk over, plus the extraction hose which I've run out through the gap where a window will eventually go. Maintenance so far is wiping the lens every few hours of cutting and vaccuming the honeycomb. The 4.6 from around 226 ratings with 100 a month buying it is a small sample for an engraving machine at this money, and I'd kinda expected more owner reports, but the rails and belts inside look like they were built to be serviced rather than replaced, which is the reasn I bought it over the sealed Glowforge.

How are the belts and rails holding up on the S1 past the first year, and has the lid interlock or flame sensor started false tripping for you?