Description

Laser welding of a thin hypodermic tube (0.004'' wall thickness) using a LaserStar iWeld machine for the FFPE Coring Robot.  Parts are all Stainless 316.

This was fairly tricky as the walls are so thin that any deformation of the ID would cause issues for our application, as the design has a sliding pin going through the tube.  The laser welding settings had to be dialed down and then tuned until acceptable welds were created without deformation.

A custom jig was built in order to lock the parts at specific angles, rotate the part, and allow quick changes for processing fairly large batches of parts quickly and consistently.  The jig was designed and made in a couple of days using a waterjet cutter and a manual lathe.