Laser Stencil Projection

Last night my girlfriend came to me with a slight problem. The plaques she is painting for her family were a little too big for the stencil she had bought. But it font was "perfect" so she didn't want to buy another. She asked if I knew of any way to make the letters bigger.

My initial thought was yeah, I'll just use my 520, bright, unfocused should be just about right to be able to see but not so bright that it would be painful to look at. Only I don't want to run my 520 for too long, especially for something as mundane as this, AND my 520 is in a grenade which would be difficult to mount / hold steady. Since it is the lowest powered focusable laser I have right now, I knew I had to think of something else.

So I used a fasttech 5V 532, jumped the button, and wired it to USB, put it in an empty ebay pen host and used a lens from DTR's projector optics kits to defocus it. All held in place by a little vice I have. The result? the 1 inch letters were projected to 1.5 inches (adjustable but this is about the right size)

The set up: (with bonus beamshot that required so much fog my fire alarms went off)




Close up of the lens: (not sure what my camera was trying to focus on)


The projected letters:


There are probably "better" or "easier" solutions. But this was a lot of fun, AND I got to use LASERS

Thanks for reading!

Way to use your imagination man! Thats a cool idea for any artist to ponder when working with stencils.