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Anyone know where you can buy parts to make a high powered laser? I am looking for parts to make a thin beam that held long enough could burn through plastic. Maybe even thin metal.
Anyone know where you can buy parts to make a high powered laser? I am looking for parts to make a thin beam that held long enough could burn through plastic. Maybe even thin metal.
Have you ever looked at the low efficiencies of lasers?.
They require HUGE amounts of power if required to cut anything, probably more than a domestic electricity supply is capable of?. I went to a laser/hologram lecture at university years ago - the lecturer brought the laser he used to make his holograms, he wasn't able to show it working as it required a three phase industrial supply - and this was too low a power to cut anything!.
I found this site that sells "burning" lasers. One of them states that it uses 115vac @ 5amps for input voltage. The prices are a little more then I would want to spend. :?
I used to repair lasers at work, and to give you an idea of the power/size needed to cut steel.. The incoming line power was 208 volts 3 phase at 60 amps. The resonator (where the beam is created) was 10 feet long. Inside the machine was a 35kv transformer (approx 200 lbs) a vacuum pump(125 lbs) at least 15 circuit boards. The list goes on. Theese machines were old technology (19 yrs ago) and I'm sure a lot has changed since.. They were manufactured by Coherent General and were
called Super 48+..They were 1,000 watts and would cut 3/4" steel with ease. If you do manage to get one together, be extremely careful , the school taught us that the high voltage kills more techs than the actual laser beam. The beam on the other hand (invisible to naked eye) will cause deep tissue burns that almost never heal. Our machine used an nc controller (Anorad) to move the cutting head instead of moving the metal.
They had a video with our machine , it was slicing up hot dogs to simulate human fingers..
Again be careful..
The trick is getting a friggin waterproof housing so you can put it on the friggin shark's head.
https://www.optotronics.com/products.php (used to go by "Lasershoppe")
Now sells up to 150mW. They were famous on the net for selling green diode lasers up to something like a half a watt, that was where the cool video of burning through a plastic cup came from, but in a short time after only a few sales the FBI started poking around and asking questions. He decided on his own that selling such potentially dangerous handheld devices to lay consumers on the net might not be such a good idea and went back to selling "very dangerous" as opposed to "extremely dangerous" lasers.
You know, surplus/wholesale places now sell red laser pointers for under $1. I've seen eBay lots for 200 for $100 including the shipping. I keep wondering if there isn't something spectacular or at least "craptacular" that could be done with a bunch of those.
Certainly a 10x10 array with a total 1/2 watt output has to have some degree of coolness to it. I can't think of any way to make one beam out of it though, the light doesn't originate at one point so the best one could hope for could be intensive manual alignment to make the beams converge at one and only one distance. This could be used to pop a balloon or burn a surface at exactly the right point.
With two very large lenses the array could sort of be focused into a narrower stream, but overall stream divergence is still limited colinearity between the beams which should be quite poor. The best of tweaking would soon be washed away by thermal distortion of the array.
You know, surplus/wholesale places now sell red laser pointers for under $1. I've seen eBay lots for 200 for $100 including the shipping. I keep wondering if there isn't something spectacular or at least "craptacular" that could be done with a bunch of those.
Certainly a 10x10 array with a total 1/2 watt output has to have some degree of coolness to it. I can't think of any way to make one beam out of it though, the light doesn't originate at one point so the best one could hope for could be intensive manual alignment to make the beams converge at one and only one distance. This could be used to pop a balloon or burn a surface at exactly the right point.
With two very large lenses the array could sort of be focused into a narrower stream, but overall stream divergence is still limited colinearity between the beams which should be quite poor. The best of tweaking would soon be washed away by thermal distortion of the array.
Of course they do- if they all hit the same spot. They're not in phase though, but it's not like we're trying to build something for lab or indeed any useful purpose. If the aiming is such that you make a 5mW spot here and another 5mW spot 2" away, it's just that.
I'm kinda curious what an array of 200 laser pointers would look like. If kept in those 1/2" cylinders, it would only be around 7" on a side. Actually a little bit shorter since an offset pattern would make sense. Another thought would be to have one array behind the other, beaming through the gaps in between the housings.
Estimating 3v @ 50mA, that gets me something like 30 watts input power. And that's not using the drivers which burn up some of the voltage, I'm thinking of a few long series strings and assuming these things just use constant current drive?
I could see mounting this thing on a handle and keeping it as my "laser pistol". Incredibly stupid and moderately dangerous, it's pretty much within my character to try to do.
yep 3V * 50mA * 100 = 15w Wow..
Ya Know that lining up 100 would be very difficult. But you may be able to get them to converge on a balloon at say 1 meter away..
I'm kinda thinking like this. Focus each one (little known fact, the focus is adjustable with a screwdriver) for the minimum dot size at 50 ft. I turn on one reference pointer and lay it and the next one on a flat surface, then apply UV sensitive epoxy. Tweak the position to make a perfect convergence at 50 ft and apply UV causing the epoxy to freeze in position. That stuff hardens in about 1 min of strong UV. Usually epoxies do not shrink during their cure and is inflexible so it should hold the alignment as well as possible. Then turn off that one but leave the reference beam on. Align the next one with the reference and repeat.
Make rows of 7, then perform a similar procedure to line up the row assemblies with the reference beam in the primary row.
I am not sure how these things are driven. I need to take one apart. It looks like the driver may have a photodiode inside the unit for feedback, I remember they were more complicated than a resistor ballast. And it's unlikely they built a circuit in there for something that is not indispensible. How they make these things for <$0.50 is beyond me.
And I am almost certain the diode body is the cathode and it's tied to the case. This sucks because that even if I wanted to bypass the driver, the case being ground would prevent being able to put them in series with the mouting scheme I just described. So at this point it looks like I need to bypass the switch and provide 4.5v to all the pointers, so now we're talking 10 amps at 4.5v total, which is harder to build a driver for and less efficient.
Now most of the laser pointers I've had are crap, and I've taken a few apart. One had some kind of metallized plastic making the connection between the laser diode case and the brass body, this would suck. I can't remember exactly what it was like but I remember that I decided there was no reasonable way to fix it. Others designs seemed to only have trouble with the button, which I won't be using.
I'm all over this idea now. It's just such a spectacular degree of stupidity, I can't imagine why it hasn't been done so far.
I was thinking about a small unit. Something that could be used to drill holes in circuit boards. But it would be nice to explode something! :lol: :wink:
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