William Kane 
September 3, 2026 Process Intelligence, 60 kW Cutting, AI Quality, and Manufacturing at Sea This week’s stories cover a wide range of laser manufacturing, but they share a common theme. The laser itself is only one part of a production system. Scanner control is becoming more closely connected with process monitoring. Cutting systems continue pushing … Read more
What CNC machines—and an established part of the automation industry I should have paid more attention to—taught me about building more flexible machines I have spent much of my career programming machines. Some have been conventional PLC-controlled machines built around sequential operations. Others have been CNC-style systems where the machine programming and the part programming … Read more
The laser source may be the heart of the system, but beam delivery, motion, controls, safety, process knowledge, and maintainability determine whether the machine actually succeeds. Fiber lasers have changed industrial manufacturing. They are compact, efficient, reliable, and increasingly available in power levels and configurations that would have been difficult to imagine just a few … Read more
Automation Notes What If We Standardized the Control System Before Building the Next Laser Machine? The machine should be custom. The control foundation does not always have to be. One thing that has bothered me for years in custom machine building is how often we solve the same control problems over and over again. A … Read more
When we buy a new laser cutting or welding system, most of the discussion is understandably about what the machine can do today. How fast will it cut or weld? What tolerances can it hold? What materials can it process? How much production can we get through it? But there is another question that may … Read more
August 27, 2026 Is Laser Welding Ready for the Mainstream? MWL Laser Manufacturing Weekly — Fifth Edition August 27, 2026 This week, we look at a question I think we’re going to hear more often: Is laser welding finally ready to move deeper into mainstream U.S. fabrication? We also look at a laser cutter that … Read more
An alarm can be technically correct and still be almost useless to the person troubleshooting the machine. I have a confession. Over the years, I have written some machine alarms that probably made perfect sense to me while I was programming the machine—and weren’t nearly as useful to the person who eventually had to troubleshoot … Read more
A practical, easy-to-understand guide for U.S. manufacturers and fabrication shops considering handheld laser welding. It covers safety, equipment selection, setup, process basics, materials, joint design, fume control, qualification, quality, and practical steps for getting started—supported by reliable industry, government, manufacturer, and peer-reviewed sources.
One subsystem that has caused me more commissioning trouble than people might expect is the cutting gas system.One lesson I learned building laser cutting machines is that saying:“I need 300 psi nitrogen.”doesn’t really define the requirement.What you actually need to know is:“I need this pressure while flowing this much gas.”Laser cutting—especially high-pressure nitrogen cutting—can require … Read more
