I bought this because I wanted to do a STEM project with my grand daughter. She is 12, and basically built the whole thing, with a little guidance. There were only a couple of assembly issues, and the only advice I would give is to attach the stepper motors to the worm drive things before you mount the stepper to the frame.A small amount of spray ptfe lube and it quieted a lot.The software that comes with it is fine, and free, and I couldn't make it work. It connected and all that, but it seemed to send the head off into the hinterlands. After looking online, I decided to get a 30 day trial of something called lightburn. I couldn't get that to reliably talk to the laser burner until I watched the intro video... It uses the USB-serial connection to talk to the burner and then immediately forgets the interface it used to talk to the device.My point is that something like this is half software and half hardware, and I'm not just talking about the internal software on the GRBL board.First thing I tried burning was some typing paper. Guess what? This is a visible light laser. The blue light reflects off of the white paper. Keep dumping heat into the white paper? Well, eventually it will char just a little, and that causes a cascade effect, and suddenly you have a larger than expected area of charred paper. Burning brown craft paper (as in a cardboard box section) gives you a crisp set of lines that look nice and crisp.I was able to run the laser at around 500mm/minute, and 70% power to get good crisp lines on craft paper.I have yet to try the wood carving mode. I have also not tried the offline controller.One thing you need to understand is that this is all standard parts. Standard GRBL board, standard software, standard stepper motors. It is a decent kit. It is not hard to put together, all the tools work.But it won't be able to do what a multi-thousand dollar rig will. It is fairly stiff, the black parts are decent machined plywood, bearings are pressed in, and we never felt like we were fighting the kit to get it built. There were enough screws, and a couple extra.