Another really interesting laser related link from Hackaday

The brilliant thing in this is using the laser to cut and then WELD acrylic!

(Laser Cut-and-Weld Makes 3D Objects | Hackaday)

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Neat! Here’s the ACM paper, if someone has access and doesn’t mind summarizing I’d love to hear.

@Dan Found the ACM paper on Google Scholar, shared by one of the authors:

http://www.stefaniemueller.org/wp-content/themes/f8-lite/images/laserstacker/uist-2015-laserstacker.pdf

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@Dan, you might consider dedicating one of your beta testers to investigating what can be done with this interesting process!

This looks like a really creative way to avoid the toy store for my kids lol

My very first thought on starting the video: “Why did they take down the Curtains?

It looks like they do not move much to defocus for healing cuts. So the glow forge may be able to work with a few layers of acrylic. We have 1/2" of focal depth, so that would mean about 7mm.

Not sure if we can retract focus to higher than that point, inclined to say we cannot. So it makes having a bed which can be lowered precisely a requirement. Or sacrificing some of the available Z depth.

Assuming they retracted only 4mm to defocus for healing, we would be able to work with three 1mm layers.

Plan to read the article later today when I am on university and can compare the ACM to google scholar (I don’t expect they are any different.)

@jacobturner, yes, they appear to be identical.

Any forum readers who live in Germany and are looking for a place to go to school should really look at Hasso Plattner. Some fun things going on.

The paper on ACM is indeed exactly the same as the Google Scholar (didn’t think to check if ArXiv has a copy, but that is another place to look if anyone wants to try finding more laser academic papers)

The paper didn’t list how far out of focus the stack had to move for healing cuts. But it did say that 1mm thick layers were workable. So it may well be possible to replicate what they have done on the GlowForge.

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