"Do not stare into laser beam with remaining eyeball."
Seriously, this sort of project is dangerous. While there's a big fat disclaimer and warning on their home page, the wiki info about exhaust filtration is sketchy at best, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of serious attempt at health and safety guidelines.
Remember: any laser cutter that can actually cut wood can actually cut skin and muscle, cause serious burns, boil your eye in your skull, and creates toxic particulate exhaust.
And Q-switched pulse lasers for hair removal (i.e. to be aimed at your face) whose included safety goggles are more than a little suspicious: https://youtu.be/-BeTq99LqUo
You should see how some low budget Chinese factories that pump out laser-cut cards (etc) operate.
I've seen videos of workers huddled in a small room operating wholly unshielded galvonometer-type lasers (as in the sort that were popular in laser shows in the 80s.. but with lasers designed to actually cut) without any extraction, using bits of corrugated card to manually waft away fumes.
They don't come with safety glass, but 'safety' glasses, which I recognize as brazing/welding glasses. They are absolutely the wrong color to protect from that blue led laser.
I'm with anonsivalley652, who has had his response here killed - for sure, lasers can be dangerous, but caveat emptor, and all that.
I've a plan for a type of laser rig I've never seen before and as soon as I have the readies I'm going to try and build it. The more information that is out there from people in the same boat, the better and ultimately - safer.
I’ve stopped going to Makerfaire-like events because home-made laser cutters seem to be the thing now and I’m vary of visiting hackerspaces. I’ve seen too many of these things out in the open with zero protection, just waiting to blind some random onlooker. A lot of people building these have zero respect for eye safety.
That's mind-boggling considering the amount of children that go to those events. You'd think they'd have more safety regulations before someone gets their kid blinded when they just wanted to show them cool technology.
And then ten years later. after seeing TopGun IV, one of those kids wants to become a fighter pilot. "Sorry kid, the optometrist just discovered your right eye has a huge blind spot in blue wavelengths. You will never fly, and you might want to think twice about driving after dark." One slight accident as a kid can vastly alter future career paths. Safety equipment or not, children simply should not be around lasers at these powers.
Lasers like this, even diffuse reflections of the working surface, can instantly and permanently give you color-specific blind spots. The human brain quickly fills in the gaps. After a couple days you will think all is fine. Your standard eye-doctor visit might not turn up anything. Only years later, when you get a colour-specific field test, do you finally realize that you just don't see blue/red from one direction.
I've been working with lasers for a decade now, no problems - up until a few months back.
I had the Worst Cold I've ever had, and had to drag myself in to the studio on a couple of occasions to run a couple of cutting jobs. Deadlines.
Feeling as awful as I was, I had a couple of Ibuprofen (Advil in the States, I believe) and tried to get on. Checking a job that was cutting I peeked at the machine - which has a protective clear plastic screen, as I have a thousand times before - and then got on with things. When I walked away from the machine I realised I had a small artefact in the centre of my left eye's vision.
It was clearly the reflected light from the cut, in a v-shape, about 3mm high at arm's length. Sort of like the seed of a visual migraine.
It didn't go away.
It wasn't huge, but it was incredibly bothersome - if I winked with that eye open and tried to read, this artefact would block the centre of focus, making reading very difficult.
It still didn't go away.
I started researching light blindness, lasers and even reactions to nuclear flashes and such, trying to ascertain whether I was now permanently slightly-blind.
In this search I happened upon research from the early seventies that attributed similar blindness artefacts from Ibuprofen consumption.
Months later, it's barely visible and - as you say - my brain's routed around the problem, but I still see it in certain light conditions and I think it might be with me for the rest of my life.
A bit of a bugger.
- ed
incidentally, i've had a few visual migraines spurred by looking into the machine over the years - low light gloomy conditions (as now here in LDN) and a bright point of light seems to set them off for me. I've always checked with clients who want to view the process whether or not they have visual migraines, and warn them if so. Now I also ask if they're on Ibuprofen :\
Reading this, it really seems like you entered this conversation by amplifying someone who was mocking the thread for expressing safety concerns with laser cutters, and closed it out by telling a story about how you quite probably permanently injured yourself with a laser cutter.
I agreed with the sentiment of the guy, not his tone, and my experience here is a peculiar one more likely to do with the particular medication than an unsafe laser set up - the paper from the 70s indicates ibuprofen has this affect on people without lasers too.
As I say, I've been doing this for years and have done exactly what I did literally thousands (tens of thousands?) of times. The machine I have is a commercially manufactured, slightly expensive thing that is compliant with regulations covering the EU and US. It's not some shoddy DIY adventure.
I put it down to one of those statistically unlikely fuck yous that life throws out. One day I'll add it as a footnote to my version of a homemade machine and we can both be happy.
Isn't this basically what people said about SawStops ("I've ripped thousands of boards and..."), and then it turns out that the cost of all table saw injuries exceeds the total value of the table saw market?
People are really mad about SawStops, too! They're patented! But like, it's not crazy to suggest that nobody should have a table saw without a SawStop, and that it would be irresponsible to sell such a saw to the public.
Just to clarify - I have all of the safety measures in place, and am a 'respecter of safety' (to misquote Larry David) - my tale of woe here is specifically in reference to the Ibuprofen angle, which was such an outlier case.
However, I don't think over-wrought fears about safety should preclude the sharing of information on practical, industrious subjects (unless we're talking explosives or whatever..). I do think that concerns should be higlighted and manuals and media updated to reflect.
"then it turns out that the cost of all table saw injuries exceeds the total value of the table saw market?"
I don't understand this comparison. The benefit from people using table saws is not equal to the "total value of the table saw market". I mean, if it was, even if there were no accidents, we could improve society by just not bothering making them.
I agree that unshielded diode lasers are scary. But CO2 lasers like Lasersaur are a great tool for kids. I'm purchasing one for a school right now.
CO2 lasers at around 50W are not such a particularly scary thing. The laser light itself is absolutely stopped by the enclosure.
The thing being cut can glow, but only with about a quarter of the light power put into it at most (diffusely). So we're talking about a 12.5W omnidirectional small light, which is further shaded by the 75% tint on the laser enclosure.. It's quite reasonable to consider this class 1.
(I do see the scary sibling comment. Obviously one should not stare at the bright cut; one should have a tinted enclosure; and one should have safety glasses with tint, too).
When I go to the dentist, nobody questions the dentist leaving the room when we turn on the X-ray machine. Is it too much to ask the kids not to be in the same room as such a laser? If CD players need to be shielded inside DARK boxes, why not the multi-watt laser? The kids can watch the process through a camera.
1) the laser is already in a box that makes it into a class 1 laser device (same regulatory category as a CD-ROM!). Already adding goggles and extra distance is well beyond recommended occupational protections.
2) the process does need to be supervised and stopped and fires extinguished now and then.
3) the kids acting as the actual machine operator is an important part of the process, IMO.
I've been a laser safety officer for actual class 4 lasers. A proper commercial medium-power CO2 laser cutter is class 1. It's not free of hazards (fumes, fire, and somewhat bright non-coherent light-- not as bright as some LEDs), but the number of boxes of concern you can check are far lower.
Just one little anecdote: the stray reflection of a beefy laser off the side of a chrome chair frame was enough to puncture a hole in a car tire standing outside the space where the laser was. So through a window as well as being reflected already three times.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully. Posting like this destroys the community no matter how right you are, so it's not ok on HN.
Seriously, this sort of project is dangerous. While there's a big fat disclaimer and warning on their home page, the wiki info about exhaust filtration is sketchy at best, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of serious attempt at health and safety guidelines.
Remember: any laser cutter that can actually cut wood can actually cut skin and muscle, cause serious burns, boil your eye in your skull, and creates toxic particulate exhaust.