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- This is a Dick button (knocking) and it's etched onto wood.

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And it only took eight minutes with this Speedy 400.

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This beautiful, fast, sleek machine

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can accelerate at 5 G's. If you accelerated at 5 G's with no training,

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you would pass out. It's an incredible industrial machine

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and we are so lucky to have it. And I'd like to thank Trotec for lending it to us.

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So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about why it's so amazing

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and maybe we'll have etch somethings while we're at it. The reason this machine can move at 5 G's

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and I'm not talking about Wi-Fi here, is because it does all the heavy lifting in the actual body.

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It only shoots the laser beam towards this and it just bounces the light around with mirrors.

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So, with no weight on the head, the servos that control the axes

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don't have any mass to deal with. They can just move them really, really fast.

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I can talk about it until I'm blue in the face. Why don't we just turn it on and I'll show you how fast this thing can move.

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Gotta close the lid though there're safety interlocks everywhere. It's an industrial machine so no tomfoolery.

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We are green on the status bar but

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let's see how fast this goes, David. (machine swishing)

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That is 4,300 millimeters per second. 4.3 meters per second.

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- [Jono] What's that in miles? - What's that in miles?

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I can't do that math right now. - 9.6 miles per hour.

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Which sounds kinda slow. - [Host] That's faster than you can walk. - Yeah! That's pretty fast.

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- I have a Prosumer machine that's similar to this and it operates at 1/10 the speed.

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1/10. What's really, really neat about this machine is it's not just one laser.

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It's not even two lasers. It's technically three lasers and I'll show you how that works.

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I gotta pull the machine out though. I should probably shut it off.

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Don't scratch the paint. Okay.

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So this is where all the fun bits are stored.

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Here we have not one, not two but three laser sources.

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They're all combined with fancy mirrors. We have a fiber laser, so this can directly etch onto metal.

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We have a CO2 type laser. This is actually a ceramic core laser.

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And then we have a little tiny diode here which is the red dot that you see.

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They're all combined with these beam combiners and they just fly around inside the machine

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and come out and bounce off mirrors to actually get to the workpiece.

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Now, when I say technically three, I mean because this diode laser doesn't really do anything

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it only just tells you where the laser head is.

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That's the third laser source, and a diode laser is a good introduction to

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how low spec lasers work. They just use a little LED diode essentially

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and they can go up to about 2 Watts and they can etch an image on paper,

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but they have no speed and no power. These are much, much, chunckieser.

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No, much bigger chunkises. - [Jono] Chunkasores.

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- Chunksi? We're gonna talk about the fiber laser first. This yellow cable here is very much like the fiber optics

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that we use now with our editing dens to transmit data,

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except this just transmits a wavelength of light that's about 20 Watts in this machine,

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and this can directly affect metal. So we can etch right onto a sheet of steel.

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I think we did that with (snaps fingers) the Pyramid PC.

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- Lttstore.com. Now that is what a six-figure laser gets you.

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- And we don't have to have any coatings that we're actually removing,

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which is the classical way to use a laser of this size.

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That would be using the CO2 or this is actually an RF, radio frequency emitter.

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And it has a gas trapped inside two ceramic cores

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that gets vibrated by radio frequencies and it starts to emit light.

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And that's part of the laser acronym, the ER, is emitted radiation.

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I wrote it down because it's crazy. Here, so laser, light amplification

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by the stimulated emission of radiation. That's a mouthful.

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Anyway, more lasers, more better. Another interesting feature that you're gonna see inside this laser is that

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all of the motion components are separated from where the work takes place.

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As you're shooting lasers into things you're ablating material, you're vaporizing and it all gets sucked out

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and into the vacuum system I'll tell you about in a bit.

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But by containing everything over in here, we keep all that dust and grime off of the machinery.

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That way the machinery can run for thousands of hours.

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There's gonna be some service involved and you have to keep it clean, but it keeps it cleaner.

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And this is the sort of thing that you see in a production machine, not a hobbyist grade machine.

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Moving on from what we saw in here, the same sort of principle applies to this gantry.

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Everything's protected inside here. We're supposed to clean there but I doubt I ever will.

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And you can actually see the dust that started to settle on things. - [Jono] Is that acrylic dust?

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- That is acrylic dust. So lasers classically can't do you know, part way.

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They can only really etch a layer or cut,

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but when your machine moves this fast you can just etch multiple times

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and you can end up creating this. This is a failed LTT reservoir. This was my failure.

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But I needed to create a relief behind the Rez, so the water could flow through it.

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And I just etched, I think 9 or 10 times with a full power pass.

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And that's what all that dust is. And I removed about 2 millimeters of material

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just by slowly scanning over the piece over and over again.

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So you can use a machine that's this powerful and this fast to do that sort of thing.

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I think it took like three hours, but it worked. So all that ablated material needs to go somewhere.

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And we don't actually have any ventilation for this machine in particular,

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because we have the Atmos system. This is a huge carbon filter bag house

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that sucks all of the vapors that get admitted by this machine.

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And it just stores them in here. And it's completely controlled by the machine.

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When you turn it on, it turns on the bag house. When it's done it shuts itself off.

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It is a beautiful, relatively quiet machine.

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As someone who has a blower machine or blower fan to suck out all of his dust,

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I actually keep it in another room in my shop.

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This is a beautiful, beautiful quality of life improvement.

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Hello? Hey, that's kinda neat.

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When you suck out bigger chunks of things like paper disks from whatever we were cutting,

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it comes in this little spot and we can pick it out.

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So it doesn't go into the bags. That's neat. And this thing's really interesting in that

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it monitors its ability to do its job.

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When it gets full, it will send an alarm

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and then it'll tell the machine, "Hey, you should probably get that fixed."

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Danger high voltage, I'm in. Disconnect mains before opening. Okay, fine.

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Okay. We're safe. Ooh, what do we have in here?

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Okay. Look at that. So this is why it's so quiet.

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Look at all the sound padding in here. We have dual blowers.

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I assume that one of them can fail and you'd still have at least something.

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The controls are pretty simple. We have some solid state relays

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for turning big things on and off. I'm not gonna poke the capacitor.

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All of the parts in these machines are grounded really well. Not only because there's some

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pretty heavy electronics inside but also because as you're drawing air through things

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you create static, and static can destroy electronics. So everything in here is designed to last

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for thousands and thousands of hours, and hopefully prevent any static discharge

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from killing things. That's why this wire is here and it connects directly to the metal chassis.

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This little clip back here. Okay. We've seen how the insights work,

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let's actually make something now. Welcome to Ruby. This is Trotec's new software.

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The old stuff used like a printer driver. It was really archaic,

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I am so glad they're coming into the 21st century.

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As someone who tried to start with the old software,

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it wasn't fun. It wasn't anything I even wanted to touch. If I was a business owner, I wouldn't want it.

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This is next level though. We've got our piece of art. Got this piece of wood.

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I think this is about a 100 mill. So we're gonna scale this roughly to 100 mill.

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And there is a feature to fit to design so we can shrink our part down to there

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and we can go create job. Boom. Now it placed it on the laser table.

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Now we've gotta turn on the laser. - [James] So that represents the whole table?

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- Yes, this is the whole table. So the whole table is 24 inches by 40 inches.

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Turn the laser on. (vocalizing) Contact.

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It'll do a quick little homing sequence and figure out where it is.

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Doing a little check it's gonna zero the bed all the way down.

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We'll see a little bit of a circle happen on the head and it's figuring out the location of the laser.

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We're gonna use one of my favorite features of this machine is auto height sensing.

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This is that third laser I told you about, the red dot.

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This is the coolest feature of all time. We get it pretty close, cool.

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- [James] How do you know you're putting it in the same place as it shows on the screen? - I'll show you that in a minute.

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This dot represents the laser. So we're gonna take our art

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and we're gonna anchor it right there. Now we know our part is where the laser dot is.

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And as far as material prep goes all we gotta do is shut the lid, press up and down,

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the machine will move over so the sonic sensor is over top of the material.

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It's gonna home itself right to the perfect focal point. And now we're ready to cut.

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And the important thing to say is focal point

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is if we look here, the laser beam isn't actually

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like a perfect point. It's actually comes out of the machine as a cylinder.

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This is the focal lens. It takes the cylindrical beam

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and turns it into a cone and the cone will come, converge, and then diverge.

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You can get different lenses that have different focal length, just like a camera

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depending on what you're cutting. You wanna use, typically, the tightest focal range you can

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given the material. If I'm only cutting a quarter of an inch

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I can have a pretty tight focal range. But if I'm cutting 5 inches of foam

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you wanna have a really long beam so that your cut comes out straight rather than tapered.

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This machine is able to do both the fiber and the CO2 type laser.

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So this lens is capable of doing both. If I used a CO2 lens and ran the fiber laser on it,

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it would blow up the lens and they're kinda toxic. So that's bad, but this particular lens is able to do both.

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It's also a little dirty. If you look really closely on this lens

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I don't know if you can see it, but there's a little bit of fluff on there.

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Any material that's left on the lens when you all of a sudden hit it with a 100 Watts of power

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will heat up, and when you have heat on a lens, it breaks.

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And these are really expensive, so we try to keep them really, really clean.

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There's actually an air purge that comes out of the nozzle specifically

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to keep dust and crap away from your nozzle.

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Blowing up lenses really, really isn't fun. And I've been there.

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So we're gonna use proper lens tissue. Give it a little wipey wipe,

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and these all index right into the metal body which is so nice.

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Okay. We're ready to cut. So let's get to it. Turn it back on.

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It's gonna do the homing, I think again. - [James] It'll only operate if the lid's closed?

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- [Host] Yeah. There's lots of interlocks, lots of interlocks.

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It's also tinted, which helps a lot. Mine is just clear acrylic, and if I'm not wearing like sunglasses while,

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and I'm like staring at the beam, I'll like start to lose vision. I think that's why I have some vision damage in one.

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- [James] Oh, wow. - Yeah. Let's go search for wood.

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Oh, actually, can I show you this feature? Something that's really nice that Trotec has done here

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is categorize and characterize all of their materials.

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So I'm cutting, this is maple, maybe?

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A solid maple? We can cut plywood or, plywood.

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Wood plywood, boom. They've already done all of the settings.

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These will get you really close to actually what you wanna cut, and that's it.

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We're just gonna send it. We'll push to laser and press play,

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suction came on. This is where that acceleration comes in really handy.

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When you're doing small parts and you're scanning down them really quickly,

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the amount of lines you have is greatly affected time-wise

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by how fast you can change direction. This is actually a loading bar.

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If you're doing a big array. Say you had 50 different etches.

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As the etch is progressing, this bar will progress. So anywhere in your shop, if you're doing something else

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while the machine is running, you can keep an eye on it. But, you should always be keeping an eye on it.

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It is a laser. It does light fire to things.

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Ask me how I know. One thing you'll notice is it's not over scanning.

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It's not just doing the whole like rectangle. It only moves where it needs to move.

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And that just saves time over the whole part. So this is done. I can turn off the noise.

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(gasps) What are you stepping on there? Now we can pull her open.

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Look at that. Stock settings, I didn't do any dialing in,

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literally click and print. Some of the other things that I'd like to highlight.

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I mean, things like you gotta watch it run.

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Otherwise things can happen like this

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where your parts light on fire. This wasn't in this machine for the record.

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This is my machine. It trying its hardest.

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Yep. Acrylic lights to light on fire. And you can also do things like circuit boards,

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because this has the flex laser you can etch a circuit board, wire it up and it'll run.

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So we're gonna use this for prototyping here for a couple of small projects that we have coming up.

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And that's gonna be it for this ShortCircuit

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Thanks to Trotec for sending us this lovely laser. Check them out in the link in the description

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if you wanna get into one of these machines, and I'll see you next time.