JACKSON, Miss.—During a recent day off, Jesse Huffman stationed himself at the laser cutter inside The Bean Path’s Makerspace building off Gallatin Street. Dressed casually in a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt and jeans, along with a green mask over his face, the maintenance technician placed a wooden square inside the machine with blue tape holding the material down for stability. Next to the laser cutter rested a small laptop, where Huffman double-checked his settings—the speed, the size of his stencil and the framing of the laser on the wood.
“You control two different things: the speed and how much power you put on there,” Huffman explained. “You can slow it down to make it burn more, or you can create more power to make it burn. You kind of have to play between your speed and power.”
With the press of a key on the computer, the lid of the machine closed, and it began…
