laserless lasercutter

Lasers are cool. Laser cutters are even cooler, but unless you have a 
dozen or so $$$ grand to burn you can't afford one. And that's for the 
cheap can't-barely-scratch-a-chocolate-bar kind. But what if you had a 
cheap consumer-grade laser cutter suitable for the unwashed masses? 
Think of all the pretty paper doilies you could make!

Laser cutters work by focusing laser radiation on a point roughly 0.1mm 
radius. We can approximate this power concentration with a simple 
collimator and iris aperture. The infrared radiation comes from "point" 
source which is actually a small tungsten(?) disk electrically heated to 
white-hot temperatures. The ir radiation is then bounced off a water 
cooled parabolic aluminum mirror and though a small lens. The apparatus 
should be small enough to be mounted directly on the moving platform, 
reducing the usual complexity of a series of mirrors. This also enables 
mounting to an unconventional platform such as a bipod (hektor) or 
hexapod.