Laser down!

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Feb 122009
 

A quick note: our R1 filtration droid finally gave up its wee little electronic ghost this week, so the laser will be unavailable until replacement parts arrive. The L2 and L3 filters apparently took a little more carbon scoring than they could handle. We expect we will once again be vaporizing materials in futuristic fashion within a week or two.

 Posted by at 6:49 pm
  • http://www.0x1.net/~cjp cjp

    For the uninitiated… could someone explain the tech a little?

    • phooky

      Sorry, just being tongue-in-cheek. The laser cuts by vaporizing material. The vaporized material can be harmful to breathe, so we pass the contaminated air through a three-stage filter before sending it outside. Each successive stage in the filter removes smaller and smaller particles. The first stage is pretty much like the filter you’d find in your vacuum cleaner; the second and third stages are much larger and heavier. At the end of the three stages is a powerful fan that sucks air through the filters. The problem is that the second stage filter got gunked up, which made it harder to pull air through it. Eventually the strain made it crack, and the larger particles that the second stage normally handles got to the third stage, which clogged it so completely that no air is getting pulled through the filter at all. So basically, until we get new second and third stage filters, there’s no way for us to safely cut material.