I SHOT HIM WITH A LASER - (on accident)

Look at that light beam. That's crazy. You can see the laser as it starts the concrete on fire. Did that warm you up? Burn me? No way, dude. Threw your glove. That's a little scary. Yeah. No way. I never thought I would make a video like this. Today at the wheelchair factory, we got a new tool. Basically, a factory within a factory. Xtool sent us a laser that's capable of both cutting metal and welding metal. What's even crazier is that this same CNC technology 5 years ago cost us $100,000. Now, it's starting at just 5,000. Lasers have gotten 20 times cheaper in just the past 5 years, which makes manufacturing more accessible than ever. The assembly is pretty easy. We're going to see what this laser is good for, how dangerous freef flying laser beams can actually be, and of course, we'll talk about what we'll end up using it for here at the factory. Everything's out of the box. Let's see if it works. So, we have the laser here. We have the wire feeder here. We have an air dryer and the air compressor. And obviously, this is the CNC enclosure. You can cut freehand with this uh laser gun. That's so cool. And the laser gun can go inside of the CNC enclosure where it becomes a computer-controlled cutter that can cut steel up to 10 mm thick and aluminum up to 4 mm thick. And since the laser itself lasts for 10,000 hours, there's basically no long-term maintenance. And it has a 24/7 duty cycle, which means it can run continuously with no cool down time. However, it's incredibly important that you know the power of this machine. Even the reflection of the laser can blind you in an instant. Every welder I know, whether it's MIG or TIG, has accidentally struck an arc without their hood on, which leaves you seeing bright lights for a couple minutes. But if you accidentally strike an arc with a laser without your glasses or a hood in place, it will just leave you blind permanently. No second chances. For reference, you know those laser pointers that your mom said not to shine in your eyes or else you'll go blind? Well, this laser cutter welder is 240,000 times more powerful than this. So, be careful cuz as you'll see later, not even body parts are safe. Now, let's get started uh with some cutting Star Wars style. I'll just give you give you one of these. So, we have the compressed air going out that back side. We have carbon steel. We're set at 0 2. We're going to enable lasering. Uh sure. Then we'll come over here. concrete on fire. That's insane. All right. Blasting. Oh yeah, that's way better already. We started the freaking Look at that. Hold on. Here we go. Jeez, that's crazy. Holy smokes. That's so smooth. I can't believe that was so fast, dude. Insane. And it's relatively cleanish. Little bit of dross on the back. When we switch from cutting back into welding, we do have to change a couple things with the machine. For one, we can't use compressed air. We have to switch to argon, which helps shield the weld and keeps it from oxidizing as we join two metals together. We're also attaching the wire feed, which has a thin strip of metal that gets added into the weld, kind of in the same way a hot glue stick gets extruded out of a glue gun. The laser welder has a wire that helps add material to the seam. And depending on what you're welding, right now we're using aluminum wire for aluminum welds, and we would use steel wire for welds on steel. The X tool laser welder is already pre-programmed with settings for stainless, carbon, galvanized aluminum, and even brass. The cool part about our off-road wheelchair design is that a lot of the frame is made from rectangular tube and flat cut laser sheet metal that's, you know, bent into the shape of the battery box. To weld up these boxes, you can see that we use something called TIG welding, which like a little dime of aluminum is dotted in about this speed all the way down the seams of the battery box. And we're hoping that the laser welder can do that in a shorter amount of time because when you're manufacturing things, time is money. And so we should just be able to puzzle all these pieces together over here, then bring everything together with the uh laser welder. See, this is where things started to go wrong. Instead of fixturing the wheelchair frame to the table like we normally do, we were just holding the pieces together by hand. We forgot that the laser beam was atomizing the concrete just a few minutes ago. And we almost Luke Skywalker Nate's hand through your glove. That's a little scary. Yeah. So, we just learned something the hard way. Um, so we were trying to weld this crease right here and as the laser beam doing the welding got to the seam, it went through the seam straight into Nate's glove, started his glove on fire and burned his skin. Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. It's scary cuz we're not in a an enclosure right now. And so that laser beam, if Nate hadn't have blocked it with his body, it would have shot off who knows where. So, we're going to build a laser enclosure for this laser welder very, very soon. And just make sure when you're fixturing something or welding something that your arm isn't even behind the metal. Cuz now that I'm thinking about it, even when we were cutting the beam earlier, you could see the laser beam going through the metal and burning concrete. This is dangerous. Extremely useful, but still extremely dangerous. It was only on him for a split second, but even then, he's got a secondderee burn the size of a penny. All welding is just inherently hot anyway, but being able to laser blast someone from a distance is a whole different ballgame. Wa, that's wild. All right, Nate, now that it's been more than 5 days, tell us what it's like to be one of the first people ever lasered by a laser outside of the Star Wars universe. It is a very, very fast burn. Like instantly through my glove, a crater in my hand burned through my like multiple layers of skin. This is after 5 days. So, it is healing. Also, I want to apologize. I was the one holding the trigger. I was the one holding my hands behind it. You know, I followed the safety training, too, and I should have been a little smarter, but this was like instant. Any laser beams. I'm scared of them now. I mean, I always have been. All right. Now, we got more protection. And uh we're standing out of the way, and hopefully no one comes through that door. It just looks so clean. It's hot to about like right here. But all of that took like what 10 seconds. It's crazy how clean that looks without like any brushing or polishing. Tiny weld. Now we're going to see how far the weld penetrated into the metal. This is a little bit thicker metal than what it's rated for. Dang, dude. That's crazy. There we go. You can see how much of that metal came off. The cool thing about welding is the actual weld itself is still here. It's just the metal around the weld that got taken off. And you can tell as well, the heat affected zone is super tiny because of the laser light is so concentrated. the heat doesn't seep into the rest of the metal and it causes less warping since there's less heat. So, for this particular situation, we probably still need to stick with TIG welding, especially when we get our CNC mil pieces for the front suspension. They sit right down in here inside of these grooves. And there has a lot of real estate in here we have to fill with the TIG weld to make sure it's structural enough to handle off-road adventures. So, just like MIG welding has a place and TIG welding has a place, laser welding has a place when you're trying to connect two very precise pieces of metal together or like thin metal because the wire keeps on pushing the nozzle along the seam. You get a really good looking weld, but you can't stop and fill it like you can with TIG welding. So, I imagine while this can cut and weld, I think what we're going to use it for most is inside the CNC. It's a lot safer inside the enclosure. Anyway, what's cool about this metal factory in a box is that the same laser gun that's used for cutting and welding is also used inside the CNC enclosure. Just clipping it into place where it gets electronically controlled by the computer software completely contained of course in an enclosed lasertight enclosure which is where we'll keep it since I obviously can't be trusted with laser beams. And it's nice having a backup laser that we can run simultaneously even if the bed is much smaller 2 ft x 2 ft. A few tests we've run on the laser so far is cutting out a metal sign, which we powder coated and then laser tacked from the backside to hold the two pieces together. We also cut a wrench out of 3/8 steel. And the cut quality is actually pretty insanely good, especially for how inexpensive the enclosure is. It's crazy that the CNC behind me has a better cut quality than the $400,000 CNC that we bought like 2 years ago. The cut quality is insane on this. We use oxygen at 80 PSI and same. Another side project I'm working on is a clean energy drink and we're going to send some sample boxes to some of my internet friends. But a company that we wanted to purchase sample boxes from wanted $40 each and it was just colorful cardboard. So, we're going to be building our own sample displays out of wood and metal for just a few dollars. Doing it yourself is always cheaper and I think they look way cooler. I also think one of the most useful jobs right now in the world is being able to design in CAD. taking an idea from inside your head and bringing it into reality, which all happens through software like Solid Works. We've been using Solid Works here at the factory for the past few years. And Solid Works for makers is available to anyone for just 48 bucks a year. Since Solid Works is a channel sponsor, you can get 20% off with discount code JerryRrig Everything, which brings the price to just 38 bucks for the whole year. Solid Works has a desktop app that works on Windows or a browserbased version that works on Mac, Windows, Chromebooks, or even tablets. There is a shortage of capable engineers out in the world, so do yourself and humanity a favor by teaching yourself Solid Works, and I'll leave a link for Solid Works formakers down in the description. Don't tell anyone about the energy drink project, though. It's still a secret for now. We also used the laser to cut out our 2026 not a wheelchair collector's coin. This year, we got creative with it and turn the coin into wheels that clip into a 3D printed off-road wheelchair. So, buying one coin helps support the factory, and buying four coins gets you a super cool way to display your support. And we'll throw in the 3D printed rig for free. Basically, it is insane how inexpensive lasers are getting to the general public. This is amazing for manufacturing, and I will leave a link for the X-Tool system down in the video description. Just make sure though that you always have your glasses or a face shield installed or you won't be watching any more YouTube videos just listening. Thanks a ton for watching and I'll see you around.