An 80-watt laser cutter, a deadpan delivery, and 33,000 strangers who showed up to a convention he invented. The Ventura engineer who taught the maker internet to laugh at itself.
The laser cutter in his garage has a name. RetinaSmelter9000. It is 80 watts, it is homemade, and for nearly a decade it has been the co-star of William Osman's YouTube channel - which today sits at more than three million subscribers and 470 million views. He uses it to cut things that should not be cut: ham, ice, gym shorts, a sandwich-meat bust of Vin Diesel.
Most engineers who build their own laser cutters do so to make money. Osman built his to make jokes. The jokes worked. The channel grew. And somewhere around the 2017 video where he assembled 90 slices of deli ham and cheese into a relief sculpture of the Fast & Furious lead, the maker internet realized it had found one of its native comedians.
That instinct - to take engineering seriously enough to do it well, and unseriously enough to film what happens next - now anchors a small empire. There is the main channel. There is William Osman 2, a looser second channel for off-cuts and side experiments. There is the Safety Third podcast, co-hosted with fellow makers. And there is Open Sauce, the creator-driven STEM convention he co-founded in 2023 with talent managers David Seelos and Ian Dokie. By 2025 Open Sauce had outgrown two venues and pulled in more than 33,000 attendees at the San Mateo County Event Center.
Most of what Osman puts on the internet looks, at first glance, like a man flirting with property damage. A homemade X-ray machine assembled for a few hundred dollars. An egg drop competition staged with U.S. Navy sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. A series of videos where the punchline is essentially: yes, that worked, and yes, someone should probably check on him. He has called the aesthetic "dubious quality, questionable integrity," and the line has stuck because it is precise. He is not pretending the welds are clean. He is just pretending he doesn't care.
What he actually cares about, you find out slowly. The clearest tell is Open Sauce. A YouTuber with a workshop and a podcast does not have to throw a convention. Conventions are loss-leader logistics nightmares with bad coffee. He started one anyway, because the maker world he came up in - garage tinkerers, surplus-store hackers, Cal State engineering majors who watched too much Mythbusters - did not have a Coachella. Now it does. The first year ran at Pier 35 in San Francisco. The second filled the Cow Palace with 20,000 attendees and 500 exhibitors. The third filled a county fairground and drew makers from across the world.
If you came in through the bit about the ham sandwich, you'd be forgiven for missing the bigger story. The bigger story is that a generation of kids who used to watch Mythbusters reruns now watches William Osman reruns - and what he is selling them, between the laser-cut deli meats and the rattling X-ray tubes, is a permission slip. Build the dumb thing. Film what happens. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it still makes a video.
Dubious quality, questionable integrity.- William Osman, on the spirit of his work
In 2017, Osman fed 90 slices of deli ham and cheese into RetinaSmelter9000 and produced a relief portrait of Vin Diesel. Six figures of views in 48 hours. The maker internet was never quite the same.
A 2021 video in which he built a functional X-ray machine for a few hundred dollars. Equal parts engineering and commentary on what hospitals charge for the privilege.
For the U.S. Navy's "Sailor Vs." recruitment campaign, Osman competed against active-duty sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, the eggs were real. Yes, he filmed it.
One of the channel's foundational experiments. Less a project than a question - what would happen? - filmed in a Ventura garage with consequences clearly intended to be optional.
The podcast. Co-hosted with fellow makers, the show takes the channel's deadpan and stretches it long-form. The title is a thesis statement.
The convention he started in 2023. Three years later it fills county fairgrounds with creators, students, exhibitors and the type of person who travels with a soldering iron.
Long before the channel, he was filming skits at Foothill Technology High School with cameraman John Willner. Willner is still the guy behind the camera. The credit reads "CameraManJohn" for a reason.
Has shown up in projects with Mark Rober, Simone Giertz and MrBeast - usually doing the part of the build that the others are too sensible to attempt themselves.
Married Chelsea in 2016. Still lives and films in Ventura, California - the same county that produced the laser cutter, the X-ray rig, and most of the channel's combustion incidents.
The channel is the loud part. Open Sauce is the quiet part. The convention is what Osman appears to actually be building toward - a permanent, growing home for makers, students, garage engineers and the kind of person who has opinions about MIG welding. The bet is simple: that the maker scene is not a niche, but a generation, and that it deserves an in-person stage as large as the YouTube one that produced it.
He is, by most accounts, the least likely person to have built that stage. Which is, by most accounts, exactly the point.