Here are a few shots that I took while unpacking the Beambox and setting it up.
First, the fallen LED sleeve. And a nice view of the honeycomb.
The sleeve is curved, and the end notch doesn’t quite reach the screw up there that it should fit over. I think it would reach if it were straight.
The black knob is for raising and lowering the honeycomb.
The secure end. I think that the door’s reed switch sensor is inside that black box on the left where the red and black wires emerge.
Here’s the Beambox’s laser tube. You can see a bit of water inside, which I think means that it was tested before being shipped. But you can also see mostly air in both the cooling jacket and the supply tubes, which means that water isn’t where we need it to be.
This is the end where the light comes out. 
The black unit at the front looks to be a flow sensor. It’s the one part that seems not to have had a proper home designed for it.
The big screw on the left is the port for filling the cooling water reservoir. I’m concerned that there’s no lip or channel to direct overflow away from the electrical parts. I used distilled water which can be hard to remove—its surface tension makes it hard to mop up.
Overall, the Beambox feels very sturdily built, and deliberately designed. The sheet metal is thick and rigid, the paint job is even, edges are nicely finished, folds in the case are tidy, and joins are securely screwed. Nothing squeaked or groaned or clanged when I lifted it. There’s no scratching on the screwheads, either. They’ve still got the black paint that we would hope for in an optical environment like this. I always look for damage to screw heads. It’s one of the first workmanship indicators that I learnt about when I first started laboratory research. That was in an optics lab. When moving on from that phase of my education, I didn’t anticipate that I would apply that knowledge so directly as I am now!
I hope that future improvements include lips and channels to limit water spillage around the reservoir port, for electrical safety. It would be good to include a window to see the reservoir as well. (There appears to be an indicator on the display panel, but I don’t know how it works yet.)
It would also be good to have software control for the z-offset. Having used z-offsets a fair bit with a Trotec cutter in the past, to engrave a single workpiece at multiple heights, I’m going to miss having that. I didn’t know before ordering that the Beambox bed had to be raised and lowered manually. I could improvise with a shim to get a repeatable defocussing offset, but that will entail splitting the single job into two phases with a break for opening up and shifting the bed in-between, rather than programming it all into a single job as the Trotec allows.
This is the z-axis mechanism:
The one knob is joined, by the rubber belt, to four screw-post supports to raise and lower the bed all around. There’s clearly scope here to add a servo motor for z-axis control. Maybe Flux will come up with a way to do this using the control cable for the rotating cylinder support.
beamboxing 