James Evanko published a new build:

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I was watching the videos on your Portable Diode Laser Cutter build. I definitely saw a lot of things there I never thought about like the different laser heights based on desired function and the way you designed your Z-axis. Thanks for sharing your journey!

There's so many disciplines that come together to make these complex machines. There's so many things you don't know that you don't know, not to mention combining them all together is a discipline, itself! I say share as much as you can. If people don't want to see it, they can skip it.

There's so many different ways a design can go. We gain efficiency by seeing what worked and using that as a starting point. When it comes to adapting old ideas to new challenges, we need the ability to brainstorm and fill in those missing pieces. Seeing other people's strategy for generating ideas could definitely help with that. Avoiding the same costly mistakes others have made is certainly useful. I also imagine there's times when an idea that was horrible in one context ended up being a great solution in another.

Sharing the final solution is like specifying the dimensions without a tolerance. If you want to know how to make machines that suit your own needs, you need to know how much you can deviate.

 

If someone likes the topic, they'll mine the video looking for gold nuggets. One really nice strategy that you seem to have adopted is providing a sort of table of contents for your videos, indicating what points to jump to if you want to skip to the next chapter, not to mention breaking the project up into multiple videos. If you go into too much detail in one chapter, the next chapter is like a whole new video where you get another couple of seconds for the viewer to decide if they are interested again. Someone who wants to watch it the whole way through gets a thorough and coherent treatment of the same topic while others can get a 10,000 foot view. With all of your milling and lathe work, someone who hasn't done much of that before is going to want to see every step and that's a really great benefit. For others that just want to see the sections that are novel to the current project, telling them where those parts are lets them extract the clips they want to see and they easily get what they want out of the same exact video. Definitely a nice feature to have!