Laser Welding is apparently the new hotness, in part because these sci-fi rayguns masquerading as tools are really cool. They cut! They weld! They Julienne Fry! Well, maybe not that last one. In any case, perhaps feeling the need to cancel out that coolness as quickly as he possibly could, YouTuber [Wesley Treat] decided to make a giant version of his own head.
[Wesely] had previously been 3D scanned as part of the maker scans project, which you can find over on Printables. Those of you who really hate YouTubers, take note: finally you have something to take your frustrations out on. [Wesely] takes that model into Blender to decimate and decapitate– fans of the band Tyr may wonder if the model questioned his sword–before feeding that head through an online papercraft tool called PaperMaker to generate cut files for his CNC. There are also a lot of welding montages interspersed there as he practices with the new tool. [Wesely] did first try out his new raygun on steel in a previous video, but even knowing that, he makes the learning curve on these lasers look quite scalable.
While we’re not likely to follow in [Wesely]’s footsteps and create our own low-poly Zardoz– Zardozes? Zardii?– using a papercraft toolchain and CNC equipment with sheet aluminum is absolutely a great idea worth stealing. It’s very similar to what another hacker did with PCBs— though that project was perhaps more reasonable in scale and ego.
We are no strangers to papercrafts that use actual paper here, either, having featured everything from model retrocomputers to fully-mobile strandbeasts.
This could be used to build stealthy engine and wheelwell bays inside composite airframes that are somewhat transparent. No reason for the whole airframe to be ugly.
Put Thud intakes on the old v tail Lear Fan.
I’ve been considering purchasing one of these for the past couple of days.
Online there’s considerable disagreement as to the quality of these systems, it’s apparently hit-or-miss whether the systems will work when delivered, and hit-or-miss whether the customer service is any good.
Lots of people simply gush over the systems, it allows people to make perfect welds from the getgo, cuts through fairly thick materials (including titanium), and can remove rust before the weld, and clean up the castoff after the weld.
Lots of other people claim the units arrive damaged, and service is abysmal. If it works out of the box you’ll probably have a good experience, if there’s any problem then expect a 3-month long fight and be prepared to get your CC company involved.
Having just finished a battle with customer service from a Chinese laser company, I’m a little hesitant to pull the trigger on the purchase. They will fight you every step of the way, and use every tactic to delay service and wear down your resolve.
So… anyone thinking of getting one of these, take care to research what the service and support will be like. From actual users (on reddit, for example) and not from the company website.
It’s definitely true that you can hit bad snags with customs and navigating foreign companies. That said, I have also had really good experiences. I’ve had cases where stuff came before it was expected, with extra samples, etc. and of course the wtf where is my stuff.
The general rule of thumb is, expect no customer service. Hate to say it, but in most situations the best case scenario you’ll get garbled up emails.
It’s about “hurts you more than it hurts me”. If it’s some low cost temu/amazon/aliexpress item, they just send you another without question because it’s abusing the postal agreements and costs your system more than it costs them. That’s basically state subsidized trade trolling.
If it’s something actually worth the money, they stonewall you. They’re playing the 80% good, 20% bad game, where the good rep from the good sales outweighs the bad rep from the bad sales and enables them to slip in the faulty stuff without care of customer response.
For sure. I have seen a lot of people get positive outcomes by posting credible and sane negative reviews publicly. It’s not s good thing to Bank on for a product worth 1k or more, but there is always that as a shtf scenario
Not laser welders, but laser engravers, similar market/issues.
Ive found the best balance between savings and reliable delivery to be finding a seller on ebay that is shipping US stock. I checked and there are quite a few laser welders available at decent prices that fit this bill.
I’d also worry whether the protective helmet really blocks the near-IR laser well enough. It probably does on the working units, but because the laser is invisible, will you know if the filter starts degrading or if it e.g. activates too slowly?
unlike traditional welding helmets these typical do not require activation instead relying on continuously effective passive filtration as the light they are protecting you from is not within the visible range.
Haha, that was one of the coolest projects
Thanks for sharing :)
I feel a little iffy on throwing up projects videos with a focus on something the creator received free for promotion in the previous video.
Dunno, seems to be that whether he paid for the system himself or was sent it to try by the manufacturer the learning curve and his results are the same either way. Plenty of 3d printer “influencers” get new systems sent to them for testing/review before they are released. Are you going to discredit and ignore those videos when considering purchase as well?
Yes
Yes
Are the welds any good?
I mostly tig weld stainless and aluminum.
I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with a 2kw fiber laser welder last October. The results were a bit shocking. I had used a yag welder once before and it was pretty much only good for thin sheet metal work. The fiber laser however was an entirely different experience. I got single pass full penetration buttwelds in carbon steel, stainless steel, and aluminum at the same depth I can get with my miller 210, but there was next to no heat effected zone,
I havent done much mig welding so I cant really compare the wire fed welding fairly, but I didnt have any problems with it.
The cutting was meh. Id rather use a plasma cutter.
The cleaning mode was pretty cool. I really enjoyed messing around with that.
I didnt like having to disassemble and reassemble the gun with each different function. If some company put together a system with a beam switch so you could have a welding gun, cleaning gun, cutting gun, and a forth line to run a cutting table, Id shell out some serious cash, but even without that, Im planning on buying one of the china made 2kw systems later this year.
I might be a minority, but my problem isn’t the person (IE: YouTuber) , but rather that a textually focused website is essentially regurgitating YouTube’s feed instead of focusing on similarly textual (and still images) based content.