What is one thing you did with your laser you regret?

Honestly, the single largest regret for "what I've done with my laser(s)" is getting my pets addicted to sub-1mW pointers as puppies before I moved into larger and more powerful units. Now, I literally have to lock them up if I so much as say the work laser in the house. They are psychotic at the thought of something lasing anywhere in the county.

It's really a pain... and I'm extremely safety conscious, so I actually have a special room of the house that is dedicated to laser enjoyment and, as they say on Peanuts, "No dogs allowed."



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Keeping a laser in my pocket not realizing it was accidentally turned on. I was lucky it was just a 70mW green. When I got it out it was very toasty to the point that it was a bit uncomfortable to hold. I am amazed that it still alive today and it lases just as bright as when I got it. This happened more than a year ago and the laser is still kicking.

And, not having a beam dump so I use my lasers mostly outside now.

What do I regret? Selling my yellow Rigel-6.


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Handing my e2 to someone who had no experience with laser. She then passed it to someone else, and hit the momentary button, and directly hit my left eye. 1.5w direct hit. Now 90% blind in my left eye.

Nuff said...

That was on FOREVER! I was wondering when you were going to let it cool.. While watching I was saying OK after this one he's sure to turn it off, maybe this one. How hot was it at the end?

My extended heatsink maglite has rarely been on that long, and it heatsink is a few pounds. Well at least now you know better

What host was that? It looked on the small side for a 9mm. 2.5 min must have had that thing pretty darn hot.

^That video just shit me up a wee bit, I regularly run my Skylasers 445 for 2+ minutes at a time, although I shut it off as soon as the barrel starts to get warm. Granted it's roughly half the power of that one but I still wonder if I've been sailing a bit close to the wind.

My Skylasers 532 is mode hopping like a bitch at the moment, I'm pretty sure I've seen almost every transverse mode there is; TEM 01*, 02, 03, possibly TEM22, it then tried to settle on TEM00 but decided TEM11 (I think) is where it wants to be. I noticed last night that it was settling in TEM11 when I could see what looked like two tiny green beams alongside the main beam, projecting as "wings" around what looks like a TEM00 or TEM01 dot.

I regret not getting it on video and I don't think it's my own doing, I have run it for long periods but never past the point of "starting to get warm". Apparently TEM11 is no bad thing as you actually get more power?!

EDIT: these damn lasers lol, the green has pretty much stopped mode hopping now (must have warmed up?) and the 445 just burned a friggen hole in my curtains :gun:

I'm to paranoid to run my lasers more than a minute. Even my large heatsinked ones. Think if the body is warm, how hot is the driver and diode. Unless you disassemble to see how hot the components get in relation to the body, or you have a built in thermal shut down, it's anyone's guess of internal temp. The shorter your duty cycles, the longer the longevity.

That video burned my soul. The pain....I have blown a 9mm diode as well, so I know that feel.

Tmack said:

I'm to paranoid to run my lasers more than a minute. Even my large heatsinked ones. Think if the body is warm, how hot is the driver and diode. Unless you disassemble to see how hot the components get in relation to the body, or you have a built in thermal shut down, it's anyone's guess of internal temp. The shorter your duty cycles, the longer the longevity.

Click to expand...

you can bet your arse after watching that video I will be halving my duty cycles on the "big" lasers. My pens will run for ages, I must've ran my 650 last night for close to 45 minutes, wasn't even warm. In fact all my pens bar one have basically infinite duty cycles, except one of the greens which belches out a fair bit of brightness and some IR.

Heat on the barrel actually shows that the heatsink is doing its job - but you're right, it's anyone's guess as to how much the inside of the laser is cooking. More care from now on.

I sold my lasers, that was my mistake

the one thing I did.... I made a dual mount 445 laser "lab" style that I was going to mount on my rv at burningman so I had a beacon to find my camp site.

on to the dumb thing.. so day before event, it was all set up and ready to go. I was using 2 flex mod p3's. but during testing I only used my dc power supply. well day before I went to wire in my flex mods and mount in enclosure, when I went to power up, I grabbed the wrong leads and wired the lasers directly to a car batt =(

michael

Lol, game overl, huh?

yes sir... I was soooooo bummed. my whole crew had already seen it in action too at home.

but this year we will be good to go. combining the beams was the hard part.

Oh yeah, plenty of mistakes here, probably more than I can even remember

My advice would be to try and make most of them with cheap or free DVD burner diodes. The thing I
probably regret the most (at least the one that really stands out in my memory), was the time I set a
LOC on top a power supply that was powering it. It was in an anodized host and the PSU has a
galvanized steel case. That caused intermittent contact shorting out the driver. It didn't like that and
killed the diode. The driver still works, but I would rather have that die than the LOC which took a while
to find. There is just no way to predict all possible outcomes. Things will go wrong when you least
expect it.

When I got my Dominator I had seen that video of boiling coffee with lasers... of course I tried that, the boiled liquid spilled on the copper focus ring and marked it. I tried to clean it up but just managed to scratch the copper... it's still there to this day, but it's hardly visible because of the copper's natural staining.