Hands on Katie

Katie's Lab #1: The laser that doesn't burn....

Added 2025-11-27 02:10:02 +0000 UTC

Hey all,

Right, I've been grappling with a challenge a bit this year - as you know, I tend to have different categories of videos.

Lots are project videos, where I'm building some mad idea I've come up with - think Underware, Deskware, Serverware, Tiny Tomes, and all the rest.

Others are more philosophical - explaining how I think about home organisation, technology advances and more. This is often what I'm actually thinking about when I'm covering new products - it's the way they transform the way we live our lives that gets me excited.

But whilst it's great to see all the new technologies that are coming onto the market - there's some products that actually need a technical explanation of their own. Ones that really disrupt the way we think about our homes, completely new classes of craft devices. These are pretty rare, I can probably think of two this year, the Eufymake UV E1 Printer which is an amazing break-through piece of technology and this.... the xTool F2 Ultra UV laser.

This is why I thought I'd start a dedicated series for these type of breakthrough technologies that need a deeper dive.

I had to get pretty deep into the molecular science of this, all the traditional lasers are pretty simple - hot beam > burn things. But this, well this is weird. A laser that cold marks, that can carve wood without burning, that can cut tissue paper without igniting it and can etch inside glass.

You've seen the work of these UV lasers in almost every room of your home, but likely never realised it - they've been limited to big industrial plants and factory production lines, but now they're entering the home.... and they're pretty awesome!