I've been working on a machine at work to weld a thin mylar sheet to an injection molded part. It's part of a product manufacturing system that I am responsible for and this is one of the fixtures designed and built by yours truly. The concept is an injection molded PET part is inserted into the fixture and a mylar membrane registered on top of it. Then the two parts are presses against a mask with a pneumatic mechanism and scanned under a 300 watt solid state laser which fuses certain parts of the membrane to the part. I originally tried to use an adhesive to attach the two pieces, but there were numerous problems associated with it so I ended up doing this welding thing which works great. This week, I stripped the prototype unit down, had all of the machined parts (50+) black anodized and finish dressed all of the wiring. I learned enough developing the servo drive for this thing that I'm pretty confident I could roll my own CNC mill. Just another project to add to the list.

Oh and of course it didn't work when I reassembled it all after anodizing. When I disconnected the cables a jumper fell out of a terminal block on to the floor and I didn't notice until after half a day of troubleshooting, trying to find the cause of all the screwy floating voltages.

The product is slated for release at years end so I'll be able to expand a bit on what it does at that time.

I apologize for the crappy pics, but iPhone's seriously suck as cameras in low light.

Tom