Laser Cutting Basics

A laser cutter is a prototyping and manufacturing tool used primarily by engineers, designers, and artists to cut and etch into flat material. Laser cutters use a thin, focused laser beam to pierce and cut through materials to cut out patterns and geometries specified by designers. Apart from cutting, laser cutters can also raster or etch designs onto workpieces by heating up the surface of the workpiece, thus burning off the top layer of the material to change its appearance where the raster operation was performed.

Laser cutters are really handy tools when it comes to prototyping and manufacturing; they are used in machine shops on the industrial scale to cut large pieces of material, they are used by hardware companies to create cheap, quick prototypes, and they are tools used by makers and artists as a DIY fabrication tool to bring their digital designs into the physical world. In this guide, I'll explain what laser cutters are, what they can do, and how you can use them, and I'll also provide some resources if you want to learn and do more with laser cutters.