Everything following this post is pointless rambling. Ebay can be brilliant for bargains and ripoff merchants alike so use your head when making purchases and really look into feedback for big/likely to go wrong purchases. There are enough people using ebay these days that getting a super cheap...
Soaking it for a lil' while is probably a good idea as if there is any grit on there when you rub it it will abrade the lens coating pretty badly. I imagine most lens cleaning guides only really relate to dust and condensed vapors whereas you have chunks of dirty carbon.
That's quite good, I'd like to see it when it's finished though.
I think it should be able to get a reasonable amount smaller than that build though. There's quite a lot of empty space, plus using the White Fusion RGV laser sled will save a lot of space.
That just sounds like a standard afterimage caused by the delay in replacing the chemicals in your retina that were used up sensing the initial image. The brighter it was the more chemicals got used, the longer the afterimage persists.
If the packaging has obvious big damage to it I will open it in front of the delivery guy before I sign. Winds them up no end but gets it back to the sender and a new one on it's way in the shortest possible time. The box that came in must have been fairly blatantly bashed up or the sender...
I'm currently planning a laser show that I want to be as small and light as possible. I am looking to get the smallest scanning head and beam combing options available.
So far I'm looking at sightfx's pretty amazing White Fusion sled for the beam combining and the smallest scanning head I can...
Could you maybe draw over where you want to cut with a black marker pen to give better absorption? If you have the CNC machine, maybe do 2 runs, first with a permanent marker as the tool then repeat with the laser, but on a much slower stepping time.
Ha, that's not a resistor it's a heating element!
I like really big capacitors. Used to have a few 1f ones but sold them as I had no real use for other than making enormous sparks since I grew out of extreme car audio.
The IMAX... Obviously the projector would need to be able to support the resolution which would make it incredibly expensive. It would probably be worth it though because each current IMAX film needs enormous film reels that are handled by forklift/diddy crane. A single optical disc solution...
I want to make a big flameproof one of these and replace the fog with propane. That would be biblical :)
I went to a bar a while ago that had much smaller fire tornadoes in glass pipes like pillars at the entrance but these were quite narrow (~8" maybe) and obviously didn't have side blowers...
I definitely second Elektro's idea. 555 timers are simple to build and understand for the novice and perfect for this type of application where accuracy isn't essential.