20x dvd burner

you have to love the dam post office. i got all my parts to make my laser but the 3ohm resistor. it was shipped on the 6th and the post office lost it until the 8th.
now it is on the way here.

i have a diode from a sony nec 20x burner. th one listed on the forum to get. right now i am putting out about around 230ma using my lm317 driver.
stuck until my resistor come to up the power.
so what is the max about of MA i can use with this diode. it is a open can i am running on 6 aa until the 3.6v batterys come next week

thank you again post office.

from what i've seen the open cans are usually run at 420-470mA with a good heatsink

ok and what is the best way to adjust the lens. aiming against wall ho far away from me.

The 3 ohm resistor will limit the current to 420mA, that's good enough. If you want more then you can get a 33 ohm resistor and use it in parallel with the 3 ohm. That will limit the current to 454mA. But I don't recommend you go above 420mA as not a lot of diodes have been used running at more than that. Plus 420mA will be more than enough to get the diode to burn like crazy.

As for the lens, you just focus the dot to the smallest spot for burning. For sky pointing I just focus it to a small dot at a wall around 15 feet away, but I usually refocus it when I'm pointing until I see that the beam stays tight.

if you're focusing it for distance(low divergence) then you'll want to focus on something far away. for burning like say a balloon, just point it at the balloon and focus it til it pops lol