Well hey, anybody need an axis of motion?

And DVD Burners have red burning LASERS IN THEM!

sorry, it's kinda exciting, right?

How powerful are those lasers? Enough to cut thin sheets of mylar?

Y'mean sorta like, oh, scissors?
Or, wait, you probably want finer detail... so, X-acto knife?

Powerful enough to etch black plastic, pop balloons with sharpie dots, light matches, burn wood, make upwards of 2000+ crows take off at once unleashing a literal shit-storm on the walkers of the path below.

Black mylar, probably, clear probably not.

Fascinating.

For my purposes, an X-acto blade would be torturous. I'm thinking of making an X-Y gantry for general purpose positioning, and one of the things I'd like to put on that gantry is a laser capable of cutting and etching. Sort of a "Repzap", if you will.

One of the major goals I see for this is in homebrew PCB manufacture. A piece of mylar could be cut to make a passable solder paste mask, making soldering of SMT based boards about a million times easier.

Could also be used for DIY silkscreening of homebrew boards, too, although I care less about that.

That's exactly something I want to build as well, but more for just burning cool things onto wood that I'd have no way of doing by hand.

Oh, I will. That actually does sound cool. Like a handbuilt light-duty Epilog. Fantastic, especially if you can get the software interface to be relatively user-friendly and plug-and-play. Feed it a vector file and click "burn"... yeah, I could see some utility there.

Any way we could amp up the power of the laser somehow? (I say "we" without having the faintest idea personally)

Higher power laser diodes appear on ebay from time to time. I'm sure Mike probably has the knowledge to make a power supply for it, I'm sure some of the tools that Nick has available at his job would be able to make a heatsink custom tailored to water cool it...

This sounds very very similar to computer modding, so far. The software bit is the part I don't get. Apparently that's the biggest headache Studio Bricolage has with their old Epilog laser engraver, too.