Showing off my first homemade creation! :D

Hello! First post, but longtime reader!

I recently finished installing my "300mW+ 650nm" (found on ebay, with glass lens) laserdiode with rckstr's driver driven @ 410mA in a nice aluminium housing. The bottomcap on the housing needed a little bit of machining to make it handle 2x CR-123 batteries (originally made for 3xAAA batteries), and the topcap where the laser is set also need a bit of machining to make it bigger.

The housing is made from a LED/laser pointer flashlight bought cheaply from local supplystore here in Finland.

Anyway here are some pictures:

Showing housing with topcap and laser off, driver gets it's "-" from the housing..



Showing laser "pointer" in all it's glory, notice that I used epoxy to fill the holes in topcap and to really secure the laser and lens in the aluminium cooling top..



From left to right: bottomcap that is machined to be about 10mm deeper than original, 2 CR-123 to drive the whole thing, plastic sleeve that were machined to hold the two batteries in the housing, last one speaks for itself!



I put headassembly in the lathe again and smoothed everything out to a nice and shiny finish before spraypainting it black. The picture shows every important parts masked out with masking tape and putty.



I finally put a good coolingrib on rckstr's drive so now temperature on whole assembly goes up to around 10 degrees celsius over room temperature!



Shows whole head assembled and painted in a nice black paint.

For your first build, that is very impressive!
You are hardly getting 300mW out of it, perhaps around 200-230 mW most.

For any higher gains, you would need Jayrobs or LarryFDW lens (members here),
They have an increase about 30% against the regular lens (back opened).

Keep them coming!

Very nice man :gj:

excellent work!

Nicely done!

Welcome! Glad you finally joined us!

Thank you all! :thanks:
I wish that the woman I live with would like it as much too!

Not everyone is fascinated by lasers...
Reminds me of one time where me and my buddy went out in fron of the dorm entrance, and we pointed the green laser on the school across the street (school was ~20 m away), it was late, 7 PM last month I think, so it was pretty dark.

We did not see the girl standing couple of meters away from as and she was talking on the phone I think , and looking in general direction of the school.

When we pointed the laser, she like, jumped! And she slowly turned around swearing like (WTF jeez christ...) scared! Me and my buddy laught at it even today!

She was pretty scared of the green dot and a green beam passing a meter away from her

Imagine...

Well, I know quite a few people who do not give a damn about not only lasers, but any kind of DIY in general, they only stare blank when I tell 'em how much do my projects cost.

Very good for a first build!

I imagine getting the module installed in that disc full of led-sized holes must have been quite tricky. Is heat transfer okay like this, or does the module get much warmer than the rest of the flashlight?

Benm said:

Very good for a first build!

I imagine getting the module installed in that disc full of led-sized holes must have been quite tricky. Is heat transfer okay like this, or does the module get much warmer than the rest of the flashlight?

Click to expand...

:thanks:
I machined the alu disc to fit the laserhousing perfectly with dads lathe, the heat transfer is sufficient, it hardly warms up to body temperature. But rckstr's driver gets REALLY hot because I have no cooling whatsoever on that, maybe I should put? Other than that it works like a charm but it drains batteries quite fast!

I have kept duty cycle to max 2,5 minutes now as not to burn up the driver.

I'm thinking of getting some other lens to it as suggested before, so I can get more power from the beam..

Wow! really nice man i wish i could do that... maybe once im a bit more experianced xD

Nice build!

Freitsu said:

:thanks:
I machined the alu disc to fit the laserhousing perfectly with dads lathe, the heat transfer is sufficient, it hardly warms up to body temperature. But rckstr's driver gets REALLY hot because I have no cooling whatsoever on that, maybe I should put? Other than that it works like a charm but it drains batteries quite fast!

I have kept duty cycle to max 2,5 minutes now as not to burn up the driver.

I'm thinking of getting some other lens to it as suggested before, so I can get more power from the beam..

Click to expand...

Very nice build.
For your next one buy a Flexdrive driver.
Much less heat and tons more battery life.
About 1/2 the size of the Rckstr also
Downside= more $$$.