It’s been a while since I last updated this thread. It’s honestly really disheartening to be standing beside the laser cutter as I work on it, and hearing someone on a tour describe the machine as something that “is always completely broken” or “will never work again” (both actual overheard quotes). So to try and dispel these rumours yet again, here’s another status update.
-Rubber door weather sealing strips arrived and have been re-purposed to act as a seal around a lot of the edges of the machine. This has greatly improved the machine’s safety to help contain the beam. It turned out really professional looking and I’m quite happy with it!
-Borrowing more weather sealing materials, adhesive foam strips were bought and have been applied to all edges that don’t have rubber strips on them. This guarantees the laser isn’t going to be escaping from any gap or crack no matter what. It also means that when the extraction fan is running, aside from the front air intake this machine is now pretty much airtight. The room with the laser cutter no longer gets smelly when you’re cutting stuff, yay! This is also important because the front air intake is the only area we’ll be adding an air filter… And it’s important that all air entering the machine is filtered, to cut down on how much cleaning we’ll have to do!
-Speaking of, yet more cleaning of the interior. This time there were surfaces that I know we already cleaned but were already dirty again. Ugh, cleaning is going to be the bane of this machine.
-Ten micro-switches have been acquired, courtesy of @nogthree. We need to fit at least two of these to the front/rear lower hatches, as these will be left unlocked so members can clean up once they’re done using this machine. This means we need to automatically disable the laser in case someone does something silly and opens these hatches while cutting.
-We recently performed some more test cuts, cutting through whole-bed plywood, MDF and etching glass cups on a curved surface. All tests went beautifully and we’re amassing a list of known-good cutting speeds/powers. Also it seems the machine is far more powerful than we expected and what it used to be because we accidentally melted and cut some of the glass. Um, oops. Note this machine is not to be used to cut glass in the future because that’s a bad idea, but engraving glass is on the cards.
-The window into the laser tube was removed and thoroughly cleaned (there was still a lot of residue on it from when it was bought; this is another area that had never been properly cleaned since we bought the machine). You can now clearly see the tube light up when it fires. It’s kinda neat to watch.
-A “panel open” Indicator light for when the laser is disabled because a panel is open has arrived and needs fitting. Having this will help a lot during troubleshooting when the laser stops firing and you don’t know why.
-The black paint has been touched up in a few areas where it was damaged by vigorous over-cleaning to remove some sticky residue. The machine looks all nice and shiny everywhere again!
-Filter material for the front air filter has arrived. Now we just need to knock together some brackets and a cover to mount it. I didn’t know how much resistance it would offer until I bought it, and thankfully it seems pretty low-resistance so it’ll work just fine.
-It turns out that sealing up all those massive gaps and cracks meant the system didn’t have enough air intake. So, the front air grill was enlarged by just cutting it all out. This gives much better airflow inside the machine too, since the air has to flow over the material when before it just came in from all directions. The exposed metal edge was protected by painting it with red spray paint that’s close but not a perfect colour match to the rest of the machine, but it doesn’t matter too much because that area will be covered up by the new air filter anyway.
See how the machine has a big worrying hole in the front? It’s now literally just as unsafe as it was before. Yeah. Bit more obvious just how unsafe it is, right? 
That’s why we’re trying to make it better! We’re almost there with the safety and the reliability issues, but not quite there yet. As always, you can see our current to-do list on the HSBNE Trello, and we’d love some help.