freaking lasers whether they're coming out of a stormtrooper's blaster or
they're mounted on the head of a shark they're undeniably badass and the go-to
weapon for evil villains everywhere and
now us in our quest to dominate youtube's
tech vertical we will be harnessing the power of the laser so that we can
wow guys really that's what we're using it for
just like you'll be using Corsair's new hs50 if you need a wired three and a
half millimeter headset it features metal structural components and 50
millimeter neodymium drivers check it out at the link below
you know you know what i i am i'm gonna wear them
for over a year now alex has been trying to figure out how to make a laser cutter
that's both powerful and cheap
and that's where the good people at smart diy come in they had the smart
idea to make a diy laser cutter kit
giving you the capabilities of a prefab at a lower price by having you assemble
it yourself so it's like ikea i guess
and that's what we'll be doing today but first
why do we want a laser cutter and what exactly is a laser cutter okay no i'm
not gonna wear them the main things that people use them for
are to accurately cut plastic or wood in
two dimensions or to engrave basically
any material and while we already have a 3d printer
that can fabricate plastic parts in three dimensions
because these parts get printed in layers they can only be their strongest
in one direction at this time
easily pulling apart in the other further contributing to their weakness
is the time and cost associated with printing solid objects using fused
deposition modeling so it's much cheaper and faster to make hollow stuff
with a laser cutter though you can cut pieces of acrylic without giving up any
of the strength of the original material this means you can build load-bearing
things like drone components or computer cases using them
so enough foreplay then let's meet the smart diy fabool c02 a 40 watt laser
cutter kit hailing from japan we were initially worried this video
wouldn't be that interesting then we opened up the packaging and holy
frank look at that laser oh and also computer water cooling parts
damn okay this should be fun the frame
is made of aluminum extrusion that gets held in place using right angle brackets
the instructions aren't perfect and you do have to pay really close attention to
the text and pictures but if you follow them very carefully there's no reason to
screw anything up now it's time for power there's actually one power supply
already in here so that gives us one ac
to dc power supply for the electronics then a switching power supply for the
laser the next piece is the rail with the stepper motors once the tension is
adjusted these tracks should allow our cutter to robot its way around the bed
and then these big cable holder tank track chummies that i'm sure have a real
name will keep it from snapping its wires cables go in the motor side then
out on the bottom and over to the controller
this can communicate to the outside once we have the i o panel attached which has
usb ac power and also this weird fitting
thing that i'm not totally sure what it does yet
now it's time for water cooling the initial plan was to RGB it up and use
our own lit af fans but unfortunately the fan controller uses proprietary
wiring and we would need to do a fair bit of careful soldering to get power to
our RGB controller so we decided to leave it stock although
a hardline tubing upgrade is definitely still on the table down the line
when it came time to mount the laser we realized that we didn't have a large
enough allen key for these bolts so thank goodness for vice grips
then we carefully put the laser on making sure not to tighten it down too
hard or we could risk breaking it with the laser in wiring it up was pretty
much a matter of following the diagram until everything but the pump is
connected we'll plug that in once the reservoir is filled the only part of
this build that didn't feel all that premium was the dampers for the top
cover these long bolts are kind of jank
but they do the trick and then with the acrylic installed on top it looks pretty
good anyway okay but hold on a minute here if the
laser is locked in place in the back
how does it cut things ah
well it actually gets bounced around to the desired location using front surface
mirrors the first one goes back here on this
piece of aluminum extrusion and then this is where this project
started taking a bit longer than expected it would appear that a big part of the
reason that laser cutters cost so much
is because of how freaking long it takes to get them properly calibrated
so the process is basically like this after putting on the protective not to
mention very cool glasses that you need
whenever the laser back is open you take the mirror and put a piece of masking
tape over it then briefly radiate the laser which creates a burn mark on the
tape to show where it's hitting you adjust until it hits in the center
and then you're good to go no actually it's not quite that simple
either since the laser beam needs to hit the center of all of the mirrors in all of
their possible locations around the work area
it actually was about a day of fine tuning before it was finally ready to go
the last steps then were filling the loop putting on the final panels
installing the software the process for which is conveniently entirely in
japanese and booting it up
and it works and it's in english actually
so for our first test we'll engrave a dead meme on a dead pc side panel with
okay so some small issues at first but we'll
just turn vsync on here and uh hey the second half of the etching went
without a hitch so guys as of filming this right now we
just got this bad boy running and we definitely want to do a follow-up video
so let us know what you want to see us do
and uh we'll add it to the list of super cool projects that we have planned for
the fabul co2 and on the subject of things that are
super cool tunnelbear if you've been looking for an easy to use vpn app then
tunnelbear is the first and last place to look it's super easy to use and
they've got apps available for iOS Android they've got a chrome extension
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free trial of tunnelbear go to tunnelbear.com LTT we'll have that
linked below thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it's
awesome put on some glasses like this
get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we
featured in the video description also linked in the description is our
merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which
you should totally join