Been away for over a decade, new laser machines?
Back in 2013 I tinkered with a IPG fiber laser I purchased off ebay. It was only 10 watt average power but could produce 10kW peak power pulses and I found that it would cut through razor blades. The natural next step was to grab a lens and hook it up to my cnc machine head (a old Shizuoka B-5V bedmill) to see what I could come up with. I managed to cut out some relatively small gears, shown in the picture below next to a 0603 surface mount resistor. The old cnc mill had a lot (about 0.001") backlash in the ballscrews so was not the ideal test bed, but it did sort of work. We sold our house in 2015 and I stopped all laser experimenting for the next 10 years as we went on adventures.
Today I get the feeling that the equipment out there is much cheaper and more available. I think I paid about $1500 for the IPG laser (still have it in a box somewhere) but that was used price and it was 2013.
If I wanted to get back into laser micromachining or maybe even some form of laser sintering, is it hobbyist level affordable today? Is this even the right group for this activity?
Posted Dec 7, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC