DPSS quickie

just was fiddling around today and was thinking about rebuilding my yellow when my new IR protection came so I decided to give them a trial run.

When my LG Anser had its mishap, I yanked the optics out of it, and recycled virtually every part of it except the host. this includes the little hybrid Nd:YVO4 + KTP crystal in it. after a little prep with a sticky rubber I took the C-mount from my 589nm that was damaged and refocused it with a 808 coupling lens and fed it a small portion of the beam, then rotated it to where I knew the polarization should match. my guess was right on the money, and so I quickly stuck it in some of the rubber to mount it and fudged up a quickie one handed picture. I didn't give it the whole beam, due to not being sure how much the crystal could handle.

Off to computer class now, but in the meantime, enjoy this quickie DPSS alignment made easy by yours truly :tinfoil:

I'm guessing there's probably about 50mW-ish here but not totally positive. its hard to tell exactly. based on brightness alone, it was enough I could see it very clearly through OD7 532 though.




Fun times! :beer:

Genius idea with the sticky tac...I was attempting this about 2 weeks ago, but had no good way to hold it, and couldn't be arsed drawing up and printing a mount. I will try this now, thanks!

crazyspaz said:

Genius idea with the sticky tac...I was attempting this about 2 weeks ago, but had no good way to hold it, and couldn't be arsed drawing up and printing a mount. I will try this now, thanks!

Click to expand...

this is made of rubber. sticky tack stuff for wall mounting works too, but not quite as well. I've even used a kneaded rubber art eraser for it. just gotta be creative. I'd be mindful of using it directly on crystals though, so as not to degrade the optical surfaces.

This really is a quickie though. Only took about 15 minutes.

yea, certainly not on bare crystals. Trying to do it by jankily holding the parts only got me like 2mW of green lol, then i was like "F this, I'll find a better way to do it"

crazyspaz said:

yea, certainly not on bare crystals. Trying to do it by jankily holding the parts only got me like 2mW of green lol, then i was like "F this, I'll find a better way to do it"

Click to expand...

I got about the same with my hand. I have very steady hands. I've hand aligned my brewster window HeNe as well. though that one is much harder to accomplish. as the accuracy needed is incredibly high.

after you get it lasing, the true test is if you can stabilize it, TEM00, with minimal waste :tinfoil:

Nice ,

Joys of alignment ... I'm trying to a line my 1W CNI , got it from its 650mW to 950mW .. But gave up after that xD

It takes practice. Your cni head would be easy in theory, since it's already set up, just needs tweaking. This is from complete scratch. Maybe if someone contributes the optics I'll make a tutorial on it. It's a skill you obtain through practice, trial, and error. Just like anything else.

Pretty amazing that you got it aligned so quickly. Do your goggles filter out IR wavelengths? There can be a bit of it when the innards of those are exposed.

yes they block IR very well, and yes. it took me about 5 minutes to set up my desk, then about 5 or so to set up the wires and battery, and then about 10 or so to mould the putty correctly and get this things set up, and about 10 for cleanup. (5-5:32pm) just added the coupling lens, used an IR card to get the beam profile slightly bigger than the crystal, and I know the polarization of the diode, so I just took the crystal and rotated it about 45 degrees for medium power and fed it the edge of the 808 light by hand, and got green, put it in the putty, and wiggled it till I got max raw stable output a couple times to make sure I had my angles and rotation right. done. with minimal correction this'd be a pretty nice beam. took about 15-20 min total, then about 10 for cleanup, then went to work. frankly, this is a hybrid crystal though, so the level of difficulty is not quite so hard. just need to meet threshold with a good beam profile to get green. after that its just how much power you want, then correcting it. which as you can see I didn't do from lack of time. I didn't wanna leave it sitting out over work, I may do it again soon and in more detail.