The really crazy thing is that the original video I saw of this, which I couldn’t find, shows the operator running that laser right over his hand!
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I sure love the sound these things make.
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Looks like that should work for hair removal…
(no more messy wax)
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I wonder if it works for paint/varnish removal?
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Magnetite is a black magnetic precursor to red rust. In metallic iron the charge is +0. As it is exposed to air, the oxygen starts pulling electrons from the iron making iron +2 oxide followed by iron +3 oxide (red rust). A mixture of the +2 and +3 iron oxides is magnetic magnetite (black). If this device or Glowforge can knock magnetite off of a substrate, they would allow us to make our own magnetic information storage devices or tailor made magnets like what I posted months ago.
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not sure I’d want to clog my filter up and dirty the machine though
As someone who works with rusty steel a lot, I saw this a while back and literally giggle with joy.
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As the owner of a fresnel lens that can get up to 2000 F my question is; does it really need to be a laser or would some very high concentration of generic Sol photons do the trick? I don’t see why the photons have to be in a laser configuration to do this work.
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As I understand it, the laser has a high enough energy density to essentially convert the top layer of rust into plasma. Don’t think a solar-pumped fresnel comes close to that level. I think.
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This would be really satisfying to watch if only they would finish cleaning something!
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I just can’t get “Lightsaber” out of my head.
Can’t EDM be used for rust removal in a very similar way?
Depending how the laser system is designed it can handle irregular shaped objects likely much better than an edm. Plus it should not cut into the metal as the light absorption between metal vs oxide is quite a bit different.
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I am various curious how this smells…
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As someone who enjoys tech, lasers, and death rays, I giggled too.
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Bwahahahahahaha!
Agreed 
What I meant was could the same energy density of that laser but not a laser itself (think something like a football area of light compressed into a the size of 1 square cm) would it do the same job?
Hmm… Sunlight is ~1360 w/m^2 and a football/gridiron field is ~2,585 M^2, so… That’s about 3.516 megawatts brought to bear on 1 square cm.
According to Wolfram Alpha, 3.516 MW/cm^2 is
≈ 0.4× typical laser irradiance used for plasma production
≈ 4× needed for material vaporization
≈ 40× used for material hardening
In raw wattage, it’s ≈ 0.003x the power needed to activate a Flux Capacitor…
So, yep you’re going to get rid of that rust… microseconds before iron or steel would melt. 
Link to the Wolfram Alpha calculation used radiance temperature of 3515600 watts/cm^2 - Wolfram|Alpha
EDITED: Whoops! Someone is bound to point out I left out time – all those units are “per second.”
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