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Blasting Things Clean With Lasers Seems Incredibly Satisfying

It's fast, effective, chemical-free and doesn't require much elbow grease

By Rain Noe - September 5, 2016

In an industrial setting, making things clean is a messy, time-consuming business. You can sandblast, soak, scrub or grind surface contaminants away, and must then dispose of the waste. And cleaning media needs to be replenished.

Using a specially-calibrated laser cuts several steps out of the process by simply vaporizing whatever surface contaminants need to be removed:

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Here's a laser burning a beer bottle mold and a saw blade clean:

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And of course laser cleaning is awesome for detail work. When something is too big to soak, like this old fireplace, the only alternative would be to sandblast or scrub. But with a laser you can do it onsite:

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The first two videos are by Belgian manufacturer P-Laser while the third is from Canada's ESR Laser. Both tout the eco-friendly benefits of laser cleaning, which is honest inasmuch as there is no need to dispose of chemicals; but the nasty fumes coming off of these parts surely need to be filtered somehow.

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Blasting Things Clean With Lasers Seems Incredibly Satisfying

Atlant Schmidt

4 years ago

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Okay so my question is how can this scale and work on large infrastructure projects like bridge repair in the northeast where many of our bridges are very rusted. Seems like it could make the repair process a whole lot easier!

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Mike Euzent

4 years ago

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uhmm.. last time I checked the hand held laser is about $53,000. Ouch!

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- Bertil Bosenberg
  
  Mike Euzent
  
  4 years ago
  
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  The roi for a mid to large company would be ridiculously fast for that relatively measly sum.
  Not the sort of thing you really expect a home user to lash out and store in the corner :P
  
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Share your thoughts

Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.