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The focused ion beam technique has become a standard tool for micro-mechanical sample preparation in the last decade due to its high precision and general applicability in material removal. Besides disadvantages such as possible ion damage and high operation costs especially the characteristically small removal rates represent a bottleneck for this application. In contrast, femtosecond lasers provide material removal rates orders of magnitude higher, with small or ideally without thermal impact on the surrounding material. Hence, a combination of these two methods offers an ideal tool for time-efficient, micrometer-sized sample preparation. A prototype implementing this idea is presented here in combination with a case study. Cantilevers with a length of several hundred micrometers were machined into 25 μm, 50 μm and 100 μm thick, cold rolled tungsten foils. Scanning electron microscopy analyses reveal the …