How We All Started.

As a travelling salesman in 1995 , the MD of company brought out a laser pointer to use pointing at flipchart ...first time i had seen one and it had me transfixed ..at the time the cost of £80 was not something i could justify ...then the NET took off and i was selling computer componants on NEWGROUPS - remmeber them guys ! Found a source for little keychain lasers and started selling them , within 6 month i had imported a leadlight to TWEAK and been addicted ever since ...also run a laser show company for gigs and advertising on buildings

Im here to sell off bits n peices and keep upto date on whats happening


paul

I had had a red laser soon after the price dropped below $5.00 which I quickly became board with and dissected them only to find out that I had broken a perfectly good laser that had no cool or useful parts. Over the years I bought several more $5.00 lasers,got board and promptly dissected them. I also cannibalized a few CD ROM drives over the years only to find that these lasers were crap as well. So I put the idea of getting a nicer laser aside because I was too young to be able to afford these kinds of things.

Earlier this year (2010 for record purposes) the local used book store began selling video tapes for <$5 so while buying a bunch of old movies and watching all the good ones from years past my mom spotted one of her favourites named "real genius" Real Genius - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . It's an awesome movie about high school geniuses building lasers and eventually a 5MW (MEGA WATT not milliwatt) excimer laser which burns through a brick wall,a 1/2" steel plate,the window behind them, the tree behind that , the head of a bronze statue behind that, and finally a burger joint sign. After that everything is spoilers but they fill the teacher's house with popcorn ,which he hates, and use the laser to pop it in order to get even with him.

After watching that movie I went on ebay and bought up 12 IR laser diodes ( I've fried 4 of them thus far) ,5 <5mw red laser pointers (one of which I took apart and broke already), 4 <5mw green lasers (All which I've taken apart and pot modded 1 of these I disassembled too far and thus broke it. The rest of them melt electrical tape nicely :beer: ) , and 1 10" HeNe tube which I'm looking for a portable CRT TV set or another small power supply so I can make a hand held device with it. After that I got stuck in the 445 craze and spent 38.50 for a diode only to find that I need to spend another $90 on a driver and on the kryton GB thread as a host. Guess I'm another victim of the laser money pit. :crackup:

Since the first time i saw a laser, i was fascinated by it. it was a cheap red pointer, it wasnt mine though it was one of my friends, but i loved the fact that you could see a dot and no beam whatsoever. kinda like secretly pointing at people. haha.

then by mistake, i saw that if i kicked dust in the air the beam would become visible. and i was AMAZED. it was super "straight" i know how much of a fool i must have looked at the park in the middle of the night kicking sand up all around lol. After that i had to have one, so one day when i was in like 7th grade, i went with my mom to the 99 cent store, and i saw they had those there for $5 bucks i asked her to buy me one but said no. i then later, one day after school took the bus to the store and bought one. My dad was very angry at me because "i could blind myself or other people with it" and he took it away.

i went to the store again and bought 3 more, he saw one and took it away again. i was then very careful at using them when he didnt see it lol. i then proceeded to take one apart after the batteries had died in it. i realized that it was expendable because i could buy a new laser for the same price that i bought the batteries. i just broke it though but didnt care because i had anotherone

It wasnt until after highschool, that i was invited to some physics conference that i really wanted to bring a green laser with me lol. i looked EVERYWHERE and finaly found a 5mW greeene at radioshack and bought it. i then dove into the hobby and bought a HD DVD player for the 360 just to take it appart for the diode. my mom was very confused and couldnt understand why. then i bought a 100mW from o-like and so on, now i have two 445 diodes waiting for their hosts

seeing the actual beam is still my favorite part

The old classic was my beginning. Found my diode from StoneTek

I had bought one of the red laser pen's from SkyMall for like $60 a long long time ago too though. I remember thinking it was so cool that you could see it on high way signs miles away.

-Kendall

sk8er4514 said:

The old classic was my beginning. Found my diode from StoneTek

I had bought one of the red laser pen's from SkyMall for like $60 a long long time ago too though. I remember thinking it was so cool that you could see it on high way signs miles away.

-Kendall

Click to expand...

Same here, found KipKay's video, then found Dragonlasers, but ultimately bought a premade PHR module from you around this time last year.

-Trevor

Uhm ..... if i recall correctly (i can be wrong ..... sorry, it's the age ), i "started" to play with lasers, with an old glassy 50cm He-Ne 5mW tube, found in an electronic fair (only the tube, so i had to build my own PSU) ..... in the 1977, when i was 15

In the late 1980's my science fair project was about lasers. A friend of mine's dad worked at a printing shop, and he had salvaged a HeNe from some sort of giant laser printer. He helped us set it up and point it through a series of mirrors etc. We researched how lasers worked, and wrote up pages of information explaining what photons were, what coherence is, etc, along with a demonstration of an actual laser. We placed close to last. The winner that year was about chickens. The second place winner was about the science of clouds. We lived in a religious rural community, and anything technical was considered evil. Pretty sad actually.
Years later my interest was renewed when a friend of mine bought a 5mW keychain red, which was super high tech at the time. I think he paid $150 for it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever to exist. We gave his cat quite the workout with that thing.

@pseudolobster- LOL! That's a bummer though. In a few hours I might head over to the school I'll be attending, and it just so happens that they A: participate in the ISEF (I think) and B: have some HeNes lying around so maybe I'll have a chance to do what you did without the religious bias I'm thinking DIY interferometry.

curing dental epoxy . . . 1995

HIMNL9 said:

Uhm ..... if i recall correctly (i can be wrong ..... sorry, it's the age ), i "started" to play with lasers, with an old glassy 50cm He-Ne 5mW tube, found in an electronic fair (only the tube, so i had to build my own PSU) ..... in the 1977, when i was 15

Click to expand...

How did you built it?
No internet, so... ?

believe it or not, i owe to kipkay that i got into lasers. after seeing his laser flashlight hack i wanted a burning laser

My story's in two parts...
1) early 80's, in a Radio Electronics issue, there was a "build your own laser" project, so I bought the parts, including the HeNe tube, but never got to finish it off. The project was relegated to a shoebox in the "to be completed one day" category.

Meanwhile, like many people on this forum, the 90's brought these cheapo red bullet pointers, I had many, but they failed to impress me, except for the first 30 seconds I owned them...

2) Browsing through eBay one day, I decided to purchase a green pointer. I had heard that lasers were available in several wavelenghts, so the green one was a must for me, and the price was right ($15 if I recall). When I got my greenie, it came with no instructions. I was not sure about the orientation of the batteries, and I didn't want to fry my brand new laser, so I did a quick web search and stumbled upon this forum! The resrt, as they say, is history! LOL

There ya go!
Robert

Rafa said:

How did you built it?
No internet, so... ?

Click to expand...

I was at school for electronic, that time ..... found the tube as used, in an electronic fair ..... then i wrote to an electronic hobbysts magazine that i was subscribed, asking them if they had schematics for a 5mW He-Ne tube, giving them part number, and they sent me back a schematic .....

Was a schematic involving "ladder multiplier" with 10uF 385V capacitors and 2KV diodes (i had not them, so i used 3 1N4007 in series for each one of them), with a final section of the ladder with 10nF capacitors (for the turn-on spike), working through a separator transformer (220V / 380V) for "safety", directly from main power ..... a dangerous realization, for a 15yo guy, i admit, but i was already a bit crazy also at that age (now i'm worse )

HIMNL9 said:

I was at school for electronic, that time ..... found the tube as used, in an electronic fair ..... then i wrote to an electronic hobbysts magazine that i was subscribed, asking them if they had schematics for a 5mW He-Ne tube, giving them part number, and they sent me back a schematic .....

Was a schematic involving "ladder multiplier" with 10uF 385V capacitors and 2KV diodes (i had not them, so i used 3 1N4007 in series for each one of them), with a final section of the ladder with 10nF capacitors (for the turn-on spike), working through a separator transformer (220V / 380V) for "safety", directly from main power ..... a dangerous realization, for a 15yo guy, i admit, but i was already a bit crazy also at that age (now i'm worse )

Click to expand...

hahaha, cool.
I got my first "real" laser at the age of 15 too haha

But it wasn't a HeNe...

I dont know where do you find these HeNe tubes, you guys are so lucky.

Oh well, my story begins with a video seen on youtube of a green laser. I posted a coment on that video and I started looking where to buy a green laser like that. I saw 240mW green laser pointers on ebay, but as I always do, I tried to get informed a bit about what I was going to buy. I found wickedlasers and I got amazed by their prices (a 200mW green was $1K there, and I was gonna buy one for $60... something didn't add up). I also learned that those lasers were... dangerous. Next I got a reponse on my youtube comment, the guy sent me to photonlexicon where they discouraged me from buying ebay pointers and they made me realise that high powered greenies were actually way out of my budget.

And then I saw the famous and inglorious kipkay video, and I said, this is my chance to get a burner mwhahaha! So yeah, I got to wickedlasers (i didn't knew any other stores in those days) and bought a pair of laserShades and then I started buying broken DVD burners... but some of them had strange square-shaped diodes and I broke two burning diodes, one when harvesting and the other died because of the batteries I guess. So well, I started looking for information and I came to this forum, info was delievered and my first succesful laser was built.

From that time my knowledge about electronics has increased a lot and my harvesting skills and budget too. So yeah, I started kipkaying poorly extracted diodes and now I don't fear powering $50 diodes with drivers designed and built by myself.

^I think you are the only one who bought the glasses first :crackup: