Tired of breathing all the noxious fumes your laser cutter puts out? Yeah… we don’t have a laser cutter either. But [Jeri Ellsworth] does and she needed a way to evacuate off-gases generated during cutting so that they don’t damage the laser cutter, or her lungs. What she came up with is a containment box that attaches to a pump system.
The problem is that you want to keep the gases away from the laser cutter hardware but you still need to be able to shoot the laser at your work material. Her clever solution is to use a silicone wafer like the ones with which she makes integrated circuits. They allow the infrared laser to pass through without being chopped in half. What you see in the image above is a red box with the round wafer in the center. Near the bottom of the image is a clear window so you can see what’s going on with your work piece. But to get the full idea you need to watch the video embedded after the break.
We can’t help but think she’s building this in preparation for some more chemistry hacking.
