The article rightly points out the industrial impact of more powerful and compact lasers but I cannot wait for those PCSELs to reach the small workshop market. Having a cheap laser able to cut metal at home / small shops would be so useful (And sneakily dangerous as lasers are).
A more powerful laser is only half of the equation for cutting metal effectively.
The laser only melts the metal, it doesn't move it out of the cut, and some metals can react in plain air to sputter back at the emitter optics. Gas is forced under pressure at the cut to clear it. With some metals and/or thinner (speaking from a commercial perspective) stock, you can get away with plain air at high volumes of normal air compressor pressures with good results if it's very clean and dry. Others require specifically reactive or nonreactive gases or blends of gases. That's true for most hot cutting processes though. Plasma usually consumes plain air to blow out the cut, oxy-fuel uses excess oxygen to reactively blow out the cut. Lasers with their extremely narrow kerf are more finicky, which can mean a surprisingly high consumables cost.
More powerful lasers also require the optical hardware to operate in a light vacuum. Plasma generated by dust and air itself will ablate expensive parts. Home shops shouldn't need that much power though. If you're cutting thick or difficult metals regularly, that's not a hobby any more.
Then there's the byproducts. Organics get blasted into all kinds of random organic-ish things that aren't great to ingest or emit at ground level near neighbors (PSA, this is true for current hobby lasers). Cutting metals can get really exciting if you don't clean often and thoroughly enough to prevent a critical mass of finely powdered byproducts. An iron or aluminum fire will wreck your laser. An iron and aluminum fire will wreck your laser, and whatever it's sitting on, and the concrete below that.
Indeed, I feel less worried about my 50w solid state laser cutting head from China than I would a 5w laser pointer, as the 50w laser head has a 5mm focal distance and the head has a 50mm square housing, so it mostly obscures what it is lasing and it defocuses quickly.
The quality of the cuts out of a plasma cutter are not great. I always have to spend some time cleaning them up after the fact. I'd hope laser cut parts are much better.
I have a CNC plasma cutter which I use for making robots, and have also worked with laser cut metal. The laser cutter is so, so much more precise. On the plasma I cut some gear teeth with 5mm pitch and they’re okay for a coarse positioning system that doesn’t rotate continuously. On a laser you could cleanly cut 1mm pitch gears for continuous rotation I would think.
Keep in mind that is the constant (average) power. Assuming this is a Q-switched laser with ~10 ns pulse duration, peak power is ~70 kW. (Kind of low as far as lasers go these days, but it's just a laser marker)
I've experimented with using a 60 W (I think*) laser on a small steel bracket, and even with the beam holding on a single point for a minute, it made a barely visible dot that you couldn't feel by running your finger over.
* It was nearly a decade ago, but I looked up the relevant hacker space and unless they changed the model, it was 60 watts.
The bracket was around 1cm by 5cm, and around 1mm thick.
A 60W CO2 laser won't touch steel (or even paper thin aluminum foil), while a 10W diode can cut through it. The type/wavelength of laser matters greatly.
60w back then would be a CO2 LASER - that's 10600nm and that basically bounces off any non-oxidized metal.
The fiber marking LASERs at work are 1064nm, and at a mere 20w output, will absolutely eat away at steel with no problems.
Edit: I should note there are CO2 metal cutting LASERs, but they are at very, very high output powers to overcome that reflectivity barrier. You need 500w 10600nm to cut through what a 30w 1064nm could cut. My 80w CO2 barely cuts through heavy-duty aluminum foil, and in many spots it isn't a full cut. A 20w marking LASER at 1064 would obliterate the foil.
I'm sorry, but there's no way around it, with 5W you can cut metal just as easily as you can cut a tree with a knife. At least with contemporary technology (In the future who knows).
There are abundant portable galvo head lasers out there. A lot of them targeting the hobby market, but also more powerful ones (that are less cheap) meant for marking or engraving parts in situ.
Everlast now has a laser welder, too.
I think it’s only a matter of time before we get cheaper cutter in the 1kw range.
On that note, did anyone ever make a handheld inkjet or spray nozzle, so you could print graffiti on walls or things on the go? I imagine most of the tech in it would be the same as in the kind of laser device you're asking about.
At the moment, there are expensive-but-affordable home CNC laser cutters, typically for a small number of thousand EUR/USD. The more powerful ones can do a very neat job cutting (up to a few mm of) plywood. There are also CNC plasma cutters, which do a good but slightly rough job of cutting sheet metal, and are relatuvely large and complex beasts. I guess a highly-powerful laser, of the type envisioned, would offer the best of all worlds: relatively neat and quick cutting of all materials on the same compact machine.
They might also replace handheld plasma cutters (and welders?) too.
Diode based lasers have driven the cost to laser cut plywood down to affordable levels (~$200 for a creality/comgrow/chinabrand 5w laser). I just bought two of them off ebay as "customer returned" for $75 dollars a piece. they work great on the 1/8in plywood and 3/8in foam i've been cutting. Haven't tried 1/4in ply yet but I bet going slower or multi pass and it will do it.
Edit: It easily cut 1/4 ply (used 2 passes, but judging by the burn marks behind it I only need one). And that's without air assist to clear to the smoke which would help it cut deeper.
These are typically called "laser engraver" when you search for them but they advertise cutting features and cut well. 99% of them have a 5w laser diode, there are 10w and 20w models which just combine several 5w diodes somehow. Each one seems to double the price.
Searching for Comgrow, Creality Falcon, Atomstack, or Sculpfun laser engraver will get you pretty far.
Edit: I should add the more dishonest chinese sellers will advertise "20w or 40w laser engraver" and what they mean is the entire machine consumes 40w with a 5w optical output. Dont be fooled.
To my knowledge, you can't really use a laser cutter interchangeably on different materials. Metal cutting is done with fiber lasers, which have very small beam sizes and have a wavelength of about 1 micrometer. However, you can't use them reliably to cut wood, because they penetrate much deeper into it and can burn material below the surface before the surface has vaporized. It also is highly variable in how much gets absorbed, so engraving does not produce consistent results either.
On the other hand, wood cutting is done with CO2 lasers which have a significantly longer wavelength of around 10 micrometers. This wavelength is absorbed very well by wood and most plastics, but is mostly reflected by metals. Additionally, the longer wavelength means that it cannot be focused to as small of a point, which reduces the maximum power.
Chip lasers would still be bound to the same wavelength limitations, so you couldn't cut both materials with the same laser. What you could do, though, is have a machine with two lasers - especially if they are very compact - and select which one to use depending on what material needs to be cut.
Bit of a tangent, but you might have better luck with hardwood vs. plywood. The glue in plywood makes it more difficult for CO2 lasers to cut through. I was super surprised when someone at work mentioned they were able to blow through some hardwood in a single pass but had a struggle to get through plywood.
Yeah, my larger point is that there are already plenty of ways to cut metal in a home workshop.
I don't see how a laser would be an improvement on any of those, unless the goal is to CNC with extremely tight tolerances, but even then... it seems unlikely that you'll be CNCing blocks of metal, more likely just 2D cuts from sheets of metal, which is pretty limiting.
It would certainly be fun for some stuff, but I think the danger level of a super high power laser detracts from the fun.
More powerful cutting lasers would definitely be great for industrial use cases.
I use a 120W laser cutter for practical, precise, CNC projects all the time. I use a lot of 1/4" acrylic because it's a good material for this class of machine, but it's not the best option, structurally. If I could do the same with 1/8" or 1/16" steel, I would likely switch to that for almost every project.
I love the idea of using a mill/router instead, but IMO the more complicated process is fundamentally more dangerous. If a reflected beam can conceivably pierce the enclosure though, hmmm...
The precision of a laser cutter would open up a lot of possibilities. Particularly making things that slot together with tabs - like fabbing my own welding squares and fixtures where a cnc plasma cutter would leave too rough an edge to have them slot together accurately.
You can't cut sharp inside corners using a cnc mill (round bits), as one would want for tabbed fixtures.
Most sheet good are too large to be placed on or moved around by a cnc mill table.
CNC milling is a slow process (unless you can drop six figures on one).
CNC mills take a lot longer to setup and program, and also require more skill to have a successful result (no chatter, not breaking bits, ramping into the cut on interior features).
Good CNC mills that can handle steel are massively heavy and large machines which makes transport and setup difficult for the home machinist.
Yes, for relatively cheaply. I’m not talking about a 5-axis CNC mill, and I’m not saying it’ll be fast. But a laser cutter is not fast either, and even if lasers get more powerful… a really powerful one is unlikely to be “cheap”.
Of course it depends on what you're doing, and what you're comparing to, but in my experience, laser cutting is the fastest option for hobby-level fabrication.
Even though it's cheap, the cuts still look pretty smooth and precise. I can't speak to the safety, as I would hope a $10k CNC would have more safety features.
Okay, but if you’re expecting a magical new diode laser to cut steel any time soon… good luck. That’s what most of this discussion is about. I think starting with a cheap CNC is more likely to work out.
The article literally has a video of the laser actually cutting stainless steel (aka the Devil's chewing gum). The title says "melt steel". That was the practically the whole point of making these kinds of laser.
Actually, wow... the plot thickens. I missed this in my initial read of the article:
> We even used it to cut through steel. As the bright, beautiful beam carved a disc out of a metal plate 100 μm thick, our entire lab huddled around, watching in amazement.
So... it can cut steel! As long as the steel is 100 μm thick. I think that is literally about the thickness of a piece of paper.
This newfound information does not weaken my skepticism about the hobbyist laser mill that can cut through (useful) pieces of steel coming to a garage near you any time soon, unfortunately.
Yes... but you can't buy it. It's in a research lab. And even once it goes into production, what are the odds that it's going to be affordable? They can probably sell every laser they can produce at a very high price for a long time before supply catches up to demand, even though this is supposed to be easy to manufacture.
I'm just extremely skeptical of a steel-cutting laser mill being cheaper than a $10k CNC any time soon. Hardware is hard. Semiconductors are even harder.
As far as I can see, the article provides no indication of when they even hope to bring this product to market, which is never a good sign.
And really, that video is unsatisfying. They show a mark on the steel, but -- as far as I saw -- they never even show any steel piece that was cut out by the laser. Maybe the steel melts at the very surface... but it may not be possible to cut through a piece of steel unless it is thinner than a piece of paper? We have so little real world information on this laser.
Yes, and a laser cutter is also a completely different process for completely different things... yet you can still do some of the same things, and a CNC mill would be more appropriate for smooth cuts than a CNC plasma cutter.
You're right that such things already exist; I think it would offer two incremental improvements:
* for wood, faster and/or thicker cutting, vs. existing CNC laser cutters
* for sheet metal, neater/cleaner cutting (i.e. cleaner cuts, higher tolerances, less subsequent prep-work needed) perhaps in a smaller neater machine, vs. existing CNC plasma cutters.
Especially within the context of a CNC machine, I wouldn't be overly concerned about safety - all of the more powerful CNC laser cutters I'm aware of already come with an exclosure - both for laser safety, and to constrain smoke (before it's vented safely).
Not Poster, but commercially-available solid state lasers top out at a few tens of watts and due to limited wavelengths have restricted usage on certain materials (eg. even different colours of the same type of plastic may or may not cut, well or at all). I know I've a machine in mind that would be great to make if the available diode lasers were able to cut a wider range of materials, never mind metals.
If it can cut metal, it'd probably not suffer much in the way of limitations on other materials... .
I found a 5W CNC laser on sale for a little over $100. It's really fun and useful to cut things out of 2mm wood. Like the sibling says, having the metal cutting version of this at home would be amazing. I have access to one at a shop in the local university that can cut 4-5mm metal - thick enough for a lot of applications.
I have worked with several nicer fully enclosed models that do not have any monitoring camera. I have a similar model to this one with no such camera, and I suspect this one does not have one either:
I've found that plywood that comes in 4'x8' sheets usually uses phenolic glue, whereas the stuff that comes in 5'x5' squares usually doesn't. "Exterior grade" or "marine grade" anything is also a strong predictor that it uses phenolic.
You are not forbidden at the Federal level to have fixed units.
But many states do indeed requires a permit to install fixed units. And have strict regulations such as self producing half of the electricity required by the installation.
One of the side effect of such regulation is that many business and houses will use cheap non-fixed units with open door and windows instead of installing proper reversible heat pumps.
It looks like someone took the "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" sneakernet idea literally.
I love reading those articles about new materials. Since reading James Edward Gordon's The New Science of Strong Materials: Or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180984/th...), I’ve been trying to keep in touch with the development of new materials. Still, I find it hard to understand which materials get into production. You tend to read news about new materials when a press release is published (as it is a relatively discrete event), but rarely about the fact that an industry has progressively adopted a new material that it regularly uses in production. It is even worse if there isn't a corporation or institution behind it to promote it.
For example, I read many articles about Flash Bainite Steel (https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1461193) in 2015, and I’d love to know if the industry has adopted this process. (I am especially curious about its potential use as tubing material for bicycle frame building).
Also the planet could well become greener with global warming but the issue is the rate of change. Even if the new growing conditions were great for some crops, evolving our entire agriculture and food regimen to them in a few decades is a huge ordeal.
I do it in practice! With light hills I climb at 25kph (Steeper hills, I can’t hit the limit), and go down at 30-35. Faster than the same length flat road along the lake.
This reminds me of one of my favorite physics lessons in undergrad: classical mechanics are a limiting case of general relativity where v << c so that all terms with v/c can be neglected.
