As part of the Lasers for Makers Workshop I got to play with a very fun piece of kit, the Rofin desktop laser welding system.
At first the idea of putting one’s naked unprotected hands inside a machine which fires a laser capable of melting metal objects to create a weld is rather daunting!
We were given two wood screws to weld, holding one in each hand you align them through the binocular lenses , which have a cross hair, searching for the optical focus point which is coincident with the laser focus.
A foot pedal controls the firing of the highly focused pulsed laser, by carefully rotating both screws simultaneously you can guide the laser pulses to form a weld around the circumference of the screw heads.
My first attempt fell apart as I didn’t keep the laser centred consistently enough, the second was much better, voila two screws become one …
I don’t suppose anyone has about £15K spare so we can have one at the space 