- Joined
- Aug 28, 2011
- Messages
- 6
- Points
- 0
he people,
First I want to thank you people for making such a good forum, it's great!
Lets start the story with some pics:
As the title may say, it's about an old HeNe laser. My school knows I'm into lasers and that kind of stuff so they gave me this old, weak laser. They said it isn't working properly. I took it home and tried to turn it on. It began flashing but a continuous wave wasn't coming. After I saw some smoke coming out of the transformer, I tried to turn it off using the switch. But I felt there was current running through the metal switch so I pulled out the plug. I heard a noise during the operation, like a coffee machine making coffee. Is that normal? I checked the fuse because I was asking myself why the fuse hadn't blown. It turned out to be a fuse that was 24 times stronger than the laser housing says. I bought some 250mA fuses and tried again and as I expected the fuse blew directly. That means something is wrong. What could it be? During the flashing of the laser in the beginning there was a clear red dot on the wall. Maybe I should build a new PSU because something is really wrong. What do you people think? On the first picture you can see that a few component are missing, but there is now solder so there has never been components. It's just weird. The laser has been working for about 20 years.
So guys, what do you think?
First I want to thank you people for making such a good forum, it's great!
Lets start the story with some pics:
As the title may say, it's about an old HeNe laser. My school knows I'm into lasers and that kind of stuff so they gave me this old, weak laser. They said it isn't working properly. I took it home and tried to turn it on. It began flashing but a continuous wave wasn't coming. After I saw some smoke coming out of the transformer, I tried to turn it off using the switch. But I felt there was current running through the metal switch so I pulled out the plug. I heard a noise during the operation, like a coffee machine making coffee. Is that normal? I checked the fuse because I was asking myself why the fuse hadn't blown. It turned out to be a fuse that was 24 times stronger than the laser housing says. I bought some 250mA fuses and tried again and as I expected the fuse blew directly. That means something is wrong. What could it be? During the flashing of the laser in the beginning there was a clear red dot on the wall. Maybe I should build a new PSU because something is really wrong. What do you people think? On the first picture you can see that a few component are missing, but there is now solder so there has never been components. It's just weird. The laser has been working for about 20 years.
So guys, what do you think?