Laser Rust Removal....

[Stuart Ablett]

Want to refinish that old plane? How about that rusty old jointer....?

I wonder if you could just rent it?

Very cool

 

[Pete Simmons]

Lotza worries there.

If it is powerful enough to really remove the rust I would be concerned with the reflections.

Is it really removing the rust or just changing the color of it?

A handheld laser with what seems to be a fair amount of power of course would end up being used in many bad ways.

 

[Frank Fusco]

Blooming incredible. I'm sure we will be seeing many new uses for laser technology. And, yes, Pete, bad people will always do bad things.

 

[Ryan Mooney]

Is it really removing the rust or just changing the color of it?

A little digging and what it appears to be doing is heating the rust enough so it flashes off as plasma. The uinderlying iron is apparently a good enough "mirror" that the laser doesn't cause (significant) ablation to happen there. The laser sends out very short high wattage pulses so the peak heating is quite high but the average is pretty low. Apparently these have been a "thing" in industry for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_ablation at least at larger scale. Most of the trick seems to be to get the wavelength of the laser to align with the best absorption frequency of the material being removed.

 

[Darren Wright]

That's interesting info Ryan, was wondering if it was real or not. A 1000w laser (hand held anyway) just didn't seam feasible.

 

[Randal Stevenson]

A little digging and what it appears to be doing is heating the rust enough so it flashes off as plasma. The uinderlying iron is apparently a good enough "mirror" that the laser doesn't cause (significant) ablation to happen there. The laser sends out very short high wattage pulses so the peak heating is quite high but the average is pretty low. Apparently these have been a "thing" in industry for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_ablation at least at larger scale. Most of the trick seems to be to get the wavelength of the laser to align with the best absorption frequency of the material being removed.

That's interesting info Ryan, was wondering if it was real or not. A 1000w laser (hand held anyway) just didn't seam feasible.

I was wondering the same thing. Then I started wondering what metals it would work on, and how it might affect tempuring. (could it be used on car bodies? Old hand planes? Aircraft?)