William Kane 
FABTECH 2026: Making Laser Manufacturing More Practical October 22, 2026 | Manufacturing With Light Welcome to Edition 13 of Manufacturing With Light Weekly. FABTECH 2026 is underway in Las Vegas, and there’s plenty of new technology to talk about. This week’s stories look at robotic laser welding, collaborative automation, laser safety enclosures, and welding cameras. … Read more
What questions should we answer before writing a precision motion specification? One thing I’ve learned from working with precision motion and machine automation is that it’s easy to start specifying hardware before we fully understand what the machine needs to do. We start discussing accuracy, repeatability, resolution, velocity, acceleration, and controller performance. These are all … Read more
Facts, tradeoffs, and a few questions worth asking before choosing a machine Fiber Core Size in Handheld Laser Welding: Smaller Is Powerful — But It Isn’t the Whole Story A few months ago, when I first started taking a serious look at handheld laser welding, I was talking with a former colleague about the technology. … Read more
FABTECH 2026 opens next week in Las Vegas, and this week’s edition has a bit of a FABTECH-preview flavor—but I didn’t want the entire newsletter to become a list of machines sitting in booths. Instead, we’re looking at some of the engineering surrounding laser manufacturing. We start with nLIGHT’s work combining beam control and process … Read more
A concern for anyone automating or enclosing a LightWELD system I have been thinking more about this as I consider taking LightWELD beyond handheld welding and into enclosed or automated systems. Years ago, while working on a Class 1 laser machine containing Class 4 lasers, I learned that one of the harder parts of the … Read more
Handheld laser welding is becoming more than a standalone welding tool. As LightWELD moves into regular production and robotic cells, MWL is developing a customizable interface to connect the part, the operator instructions, the approved laser settings, and the production record. LightWELD Is Becoming a Production Tool I come from a background of building automated … Read more
A customer wants production data from a machine—cycle counts, alarms, recipes, process parameters, maintenance information, MES connectivity, or perhaps data for future AI tools. The simple answer can be: “We’ll put the PLC on the plant network.” For a machine builder, I don’t think that should automatically be the first choice. The PLC or motion … Read more
Four very different ways lasers are moving deeper into manufacturing This week’s stories remind us that laser manufacturing goes far beyond cutting sheet metal and welding parts. We start with an application that isn’t new, but I think it deserves another look: using laser energy instead of a conventional oven to cure powder coatings. From there … Read more
MWL Automation Note In the last Automation Note, I argued that working code and maintainable code are not always the same thing. A machine can run perfectly well while its control program slowly accumulates inconsistent naming, one-off logic, old comments, startup modifications, and those famous “temporary” fixes that somehow earn permanent residency. One of the … Read more
Active index 1. Handheld Laser Welding: The Question Is Becoming How to Implement It Handheld laser welding has spent the last several years getting attention for its speed, relatively low heat input, and ability to simplify certain welding applications. But an upcoming FABTECH 2026 technical session suggests the conversation is beginning to mature. The October … Read more