Thursday, November 5, 2026 From Aerospace Additive Manufacturing to Portable Laser Repair: Making Laser Processes Work in Production Welcome to Edition 15 of Manufacturing With Light Weekly. This week’s stories cover a wide range of laser manufacturing applications, but they have something important in common. The challenge isn’t simply making a laser process work. It’s … Read more
Precision, Production, and the Challenges of Building Better Laser Machines Welcome to Edition 14 of Manufacturing With Light Weekly. This week, we’re looking at several different developments in laser manufacturing, but I think they have something important in common. Whether we’re talking about inspecting a metal additive manufacturing process, laser-cutting intricate medical components, or improving … Read more
Machine Vision, Calibration & Weld Path Correction Adding a camera to a laser welding system sounds like it should solve a basic problem: Find the joint, tell the scanner where it is, and put the weld there. And in principle, that’s exactly what machine vision can do. Researchers have demonstrated camera systems that look through … Read more
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
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
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
From Handheld Laser Safety to Smarter AM Quality September 17, 2026 Handheld laser welding continues to move into mainstream manufacturing, while metal additive manufacturing is becoming more focused on prediction, inspection, and repeatability. This week, a newly revised ISO standard addresses hand-held and hand-operated laser-processing machines. FANUC combines a manual laser-welding system with a collaborative … Read more
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
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