Melting Sand With A Laser!
Very interesting.
I noticed @Alex_Krause beat me to a post about William Osman on the LaserWeb group by a few minutes! I have to give credit where credit is due.
I wonder if tamping the sand flat before the burn/melt would improve the quality of the “print” by allowing better laser focus?
I would use what is known as play sand… the kind that is for sandboxes finer particulates and cleaner in general… all sorts of crap gets dumped into the ocean and beach sand can contain anything from plant,dead animal matter, plastic, metal ect…
I guess I works best with silica sands rather than iron sands.
But it is pretty easy to turn glass into powder.
My laser is like 2watt so it doesn’t stand a chance at melting glass but if I turned some lead free solder into powder it might work well with iron sand (filings) #todo Sugar might also be worth trying on my low powered system.
@Alex_Krause I’m not sure what would go into doing this because I haven’t Googled it yet 
but I wonder if making a “pulverizer” for smashing raw sand into smaller, more uniform size particles would be a cheap alternative to buying sand?
@SirGeekALot https://www.google.com/shopping/product/13009553741287632007?lsf=seller:8740,store:11929435869678161578&prds=oid:7378604219417475030&q=play+sand+home+depot&hl=en-US&ei=GABJWNb3OMnbmQHGgYKoCA&lsft=cm_mmc:Shopping--LIAs--D22-_-100318476&lsft=gclid:CjwKEAiAg5_CBRDo4o6e4o3NtG0SJAB-IatYeGUVRQBV6i1Mb0KQyj3WrUqZD-zNt12ikc9mYrFjkhoCnBvw_wcB
Very cool - will have to try that - I wonder if pot metal would react the same - could finally be a way of ‘welding’ all those broken parts !