WoodMarvels.com, Volume 2: Laser Cutting Plans Paperback – November 19, 2009

To the 1 star guy-"useless without further purchases", 1 star because the author asks you to pay a $10 spot for a model that, surly, took 60 hours of work to put together?! Dude, seriously? That's pretty ungracious. Do you make less than sixty cents an hour? If not,I think that you'll find that the pittance that the author is charging on his site for any of his models is a pretty reasonable compensation for the time that you'd save. Also, restrictions such as 1 license for 1 model, obviously, is to protect him from giving away a piece of his intellectual property for ten bucks and then finding you selling them by the hundreds on ebay. Possibly a bit of re-assessment is in order.On to the book(s)(I got all of them). I'm in the process of finding a laser cutter and picked up all of Jon's books when my search brought them up on Amazon. Wow, really, really sophisticated and creative designs. These aren't the sort of throw away, overly simple constructions that you'd expect to typically run across-there is some real creativity going on here. I'm an industrial designer,illustrator and classically trained painter, model maker and craftsman. I work both in traditional media and digitally, so I am well aware of the work that went into each of these designs. From the simple vintage style pull toys to the intricate moving machines featured in the book, ANY would be worthy of producing and, certainly, I cannot imaging better idea books for giving advanced, much less beginner, cnc and laser hobbyists a great platform for how to think about using their tool. Go to Jon's site and check it out for yourselves. My work can be found at robertstotts.com (so you can see that I'm not just a shill reviewer):-).

This book is excellent if you want to look at the designs, but per the terms and usage imposed by the author, you are told to go to his website and then order each plan file and purchase one plan file per cut you want to make.From the Woodmarvels website FAQ "For each and every copy of the model that you cut using YOUR tool(s), you must buy a license from WoodMarvels.com, even if they are to be given as a present. So if your child wants two Medieval Castles, then you need to buy the EPS/DXF/PDF file twice."This absolutely defeats the purpose of buying a pattern book, with the author stating you are not allowed to use the patterns in the book, without expending more funds even for personal use. Even the commercial use requires a yearly site license and an expense per model cut.My advise to anyone interested in the book, is to just look at the models on the web and skip this book completely. If you want the model, you still have to buy a license from him even if you bought the book.

I got this book as a gift, hoping to learn some new tricks in designing new lasercut plans (plans I could modify, etc). Instead I got a bunch of print-outs of the designs which would be useful in an actual lasercutter due to the graph paper.The plans are COOL, but I can't cut them, and yet the book is dominated by them. What exactly did my gifter pay for?

To the 5 star review guyThe book title is :"WoodMarvels.com, Volume 2: Laser Cutting Plans "If you have to buy the plans separate, why buy the book? seems like false advertising to me.