Reciprocating Laser Cutter

On Saturday afternoons, like any good grad student, I visit my parents place to do my laundry. While it's spinning around, my dad and I usually get up to some neat projects, and this is what we worked on this week.

I've had an idea for a while that one might be able to build an inexpensive laser cutter using a 1 Watt IR laser diode, as opposed to the larger 20-100 Watt CO2 tubes traditionally in something like an Epilog laser cutter, using a bit of a trick. Traditionally laser cutters have a