TO-3 decanning and C-mount swapping - fail

Hi folks, just wanted to relay some info on how my project went (bad).

Me and my buddy ReNNo who was staying over for couple of days, decided to take a look at some TO-3 mounts Bill sent me.
Big TO-3 laser diode was mounted in some steel lens-holder and heatsink , with some calibration and adjustment screws, forgot to take pic of that, if anybody wants to know what am I talking about, I'll take pics of that too.

Anyhow, we managed to pull the dead IR TO3 out of that heatsink assembly and decan it.

This is what we've found inside:


Heh, no wonder it was dead:


Now, we figured it would be very cool to desolder that diode (indium , printed traces on TEC) and solder on the 0.5W 642 nm c-mount I have, to make a cool labby.

Well, as you can imagine, it ended in a catastrophy:


We preheated the diode, and then melted the indium with the iron and as we mounted it, little white cube simple detached, from the heat I guess , glue melted.
As you can imagine , it instantly severed all 4 bonding wires to the laser emitter.

So there goes it, 0.5W c-mount I only powered up once to see if it works, it was so long ago that I almost forgot how bright it was.

Well, now I'm depressed and gonna put my hobby on hold. For about 5 minutes.

How much do those 642nm c-mounts retail at?

Those pictures are quite nice... sorry about this diode.

-Trevor

twhite828 said:

Those pictures are quite nice... sorry about this diode.

-Trevor

Click to expand...

Thanks for the compliment and condolences (ehh... spelling?).

Anybody attempted to change the c-mount inside one of these before? Of so, best method and maybe some rule-of-thumbs?

Heating up indium and soldering a diode on it seems to be... risky, at best.

if anyone has a DEAD one of these diodes with the TEC i will have it.

Wouldn't it be a lot safer to use thermal adhesive instead of attempting to solder the whole thing?

For the electrical contact you can quickly solder a wire onto a corner of the c-mount, far away from the buisiness end. It would probably be best to do that with the c-mount mounted onto a heatsink (using the central hole) to make sure the diode end stays cool.

Benm said:

Wouldn't it be a lot safer to use thermal adhesive instead of attempting to solder the whole thing?

For the electrical contact you can quickly solder a wire onto a corner of the c-mount, far away from the buisiness end. It would probably be best to do that with the c-mount mounted onto a heatsink (using the central hole) to make sure the diode end stays cool.

Click to expand...

I don't have thermal adhesive, heatsink nor the set screws to mount the diode on the heatsink.

We've attempted to melt the indium and them place the diode on it, hopefully securing it in place... somewhat.

As you can see, it id not work:yabbmad:

I have other c-mounts also , I'll give it another go. But I only have IR c-mounts...

I'd suggest practising with the cheapest c-mount you can find...

As for the heatsinking part, you may grab it with some (locking) pliers as a makeshift heatsink.

Benm said:

I'd suggest practising with the cheapest c-mount you can find...

As for the heatsinking part, you may grab it with some (locking) pliers as a makeshift heatsink.

Click to expand...

Well, I have that destroyed red, and two out TO3 casings (I had two, both disassembled).

Might give them a go, for testing purposes.

Thanks!