 Freakin' lasers. Whether they're coming out of a stormtrooper's blaster, or they're mounted on the head of a shark, they're undeniably badass and the go-to weapon for evil villains everywhere. And... now... us. In our quest to dominate YouTube's tech vertical, we will be harnessing the power of the laser, so that we can... Wow. Guys, really? That's what we're using it for? Just like you'll be using Corsair's new HS50 if you need a wired 3.5mm headset. It features metal structural components and 50mm neodymium drivers. Check it out at the link below. You know what? I am. I'm gonna wear them. For over a year now, Alex has been trying to figure out how to make a laser cutter that's both powerful and cheap. And that's where the good people at Smart DIY come in. They had the smart idea to make a DIY laser cutter kit, giving you the capabilities of a prefab at a lower price by having you assemble it yourself. So it's like... IKEA, I guess. And that's what we'll be doing today. But first, why do we want a laser cutter? And what exactly is a laser cutter? Okay, no, I'm not gonna wear them. The main things that people use them for are to accurately cut plastic or wood in two dimensions or to engrave basically any material. And while we already have a 3D printer that can fabricate plastic parts in three dimensions, because these parts get printed in layers, they can only be their strongest in one direction at this time, easily pulling apart in the other. Further contributing to their weakness is the time and cost associated with printing solid objects using fused deposition modeling. So it's much cheaper and faster to make hollow stuff. With a laser cutter though, you can cut pieces of acrylic without giving up any of the strength of the original material. This means you can build load-bearing things like drone components or computer cases using them. So enough foreplay then. Let's meet the Smart DIY Fabool CO2, a 40 watt laser cutter kit hailing from Japan. We were initially worried this video wouldn't be that interesting. Then we opened up the packaging and holy frick, look at that laser! Oh, and also computer water cooling parts? Damn, okay, this should be fun. The frame is made of aluminum extrusion that gets held in place using right angle brackets. The instructions aren't perfect and you do have to pay really close attention to the text and pictures, but if you follow them very carefully, there's no reason to screw anything up. Now it's time for power. There's actually one power supply already in here, so that gives us one AC to DC power supply for the electronics, and a switching power supply for the laser. The next piece is the rail with the stepper motors. Once the tension is adjusted, these tracks should allow our cutter to robot its way around the bed, and then these big cable holder tank track chummies that I'm sure have a real name, will keep it from snapping its wires. Cables go in the motor side, then out on the bottom and over to the controller. This can communicate to the outside once we have the I.O. panel attached, which has USB, AC power, and also this weird fitting thing that I'm not totally sure what it does yet. Now it's time for water cooling. The initial plan was to RGB it up and use our own lit AF fans, but unfortunately the fan controller uses proprietary wiring, and we would need to do a fair bit of careful soldering to get power to our RGB controller, so we decided to leave it stock. Although, a hardline tubing upgrade is definitely still on the table down the line. When it came time to mount the laser, we realized that we didn't have a large enough Allen key for these bolts, so thank goodness for vice grips. Then we carefully put the laser on, making sure not to tighten it down too hard, or we could risk breaking it. With the laser in, wiring it up was pretty much a matter of following the diagram until everything but the pump is connected. We'll plug that in once the reservoir is filled. The only part of this build that didn't feel all that premium was the dampers for the top cover. These long bolts are kind of jank, but they do the trick, and then with the acrylic installed on top, it looks pretty good anyway. Okay, but hold on a minute here. If the laser is locked in place in the back, how does it cut things? Ah, well it actually gets bounced around to the desired location using front surface mirrors. The first one goes back here on this piece of aluminum extrusion. And then this is where this project started taking a bit longer than expected. It would appear that a big part of the reason that laser cutters cost so much is because of how freaking long it takes to get them properly calibrated. So the process is basically like this. After putting on the protective, not to mention very cool glasses, that you need whenever the laser back is open, you take the mirror and put a piece of masking tape over it, then briefly radiate the laser, which creates a burn mark on the tape to show where it's hitting. You adjust until it hits in the center, and then you're good to go. No, actually it's not quite that simple either. Since the laser beam needs to hit the center of all of the mirrors in all of their possible locations around the work area, it actually was about a day of fine-tuning before it was finally ready to go. The last steps then were filling the loop, putting on the final panels, installing the software, the process for which is conveniently entirely in Japanese, and booting it up. And it works! And it's in English, actually. So for our first test, we'll engrave a dead meme on a dead PC's side panel with... Okay, so some small issues at first, but we'll just turn v-sync on here, and hey! The second half of the etching went without a hitch. So guys, as of filming this right now, we just got this bad boy running, and we definitely want to do a follow-up video, so let us know what you want to see us do, and we'll add it to the list of super cool projects that we have planned for the fabool CO2. And on the subject of things that are super cool, TunnelBear! If you've been looking for an easy-to-use VPN app, then TunnelBear is the first and last place to look. It's super easy to use, and they've got apps available for iOS, Android, they've got a Chrome extension, they've got it for PC, they've got it for Mac, and it's got lots of great features as well. One of them is what's called a kill switch. So before you connect to a network, your device actually starts to send information about itself and what it wants to do. And a kill switch stops this from happening, because during that time, before you connect to a normal VPN, all that traffic is unencrypted, so in the few seconds it takes to connect, you've probably already broadcast your IP, maybe a few DNS requests or a search query. VigilantBear stops all this from happening by blocking all outbound and inbound traffic, so nothing leaks out before you connect, and if your connection goes down for some reason, VigilantBear will kick back in and stop until the connection comes back. So for a free trial of TunnelBear, go to tunnelbear.com slash LTT, we'll have that linked below. Thanks for watching, guys! If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it's awesome, put on some glasses like this, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.