589nm PGL-C teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

You did correct the divergence before packing her back up, right?

Also, grats on the excellent tweaks! Beamshots?

I used an external lens to do this. and beamshots will come but I'm writing another post in the gas section atm, so they will wait a bit longer though not much to be said. in fact I think its better than it was, near .8 mRad or so. it can compete with my HeNe lasers now.

 

[Encap]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Great job--great pictures.

Your patience and experience paid off.

Looks like you got nailed it even better than CNI did!

 

[Atomicrox]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Fantastic! Did you LPM it?

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Not yet. I don't have a working one atm so I'm working on that problem now. I have access to a nice on soon I hope.

 

[ped]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Excellent work.

The thread is worth it for this picture alone :-

That's insane! , I used to have slippers like that.

Ped

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Haha! Really? Glad I didn't crop the pic then lol!

 

[IsaacT]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

I checked with Dragon Lasers. They said the diffraction gratings were already as close to manufacturing costs as possible so they cannot give a price break. The price stands at 11.99 for them.

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

12 bucks isn't bad at all anyway. Maybe we should get a few. Also, fiddled with the alignment more and got a bit more power back.

 

[Flaminpyro]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

If you get some of these PM me and let me know and I'll add to the count if I may

I checked with Dragon Lasers. They said the diffraction gratings were already as close to manufacturing costs as possible so they cannot give a price break. The price stands at 11.99 for them.

 

[KapHn8d]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

this is really interesting. I was always curious about the train of light mod going on in there... thanks for providing all the pics. :beer:

/c

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Back on topic, measured it today and got about 50mW, peaked at 68mW. Still has a pretty short runtime sadly

 

[Hemlock_Mike]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

ulti----
You have done here what few will ever accomplish.
Thanks for the pictures. +1 if I could.........
HMike

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

thanks mike....thinking i'll see if I can get a copper host made for it. maybe i can fix the run time a bit.

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Update: finally got the power back up! still maintains a TEM00 though not absolutely perfect, but fully restored to power. on a relatively fresh battery it's now hangingout in the 70s on average, and peaking up near 100mW like it should. When I got it from raffle it was peaking at 80. (was originally peaking closer to 100 when he got it) so it's finally back up and going full steam

Pics to come soon I think in celebration!

 

[IsaacT]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Looking forward to pics! My 589 is on its way from Dragonlasers.

 

[ultimatekaiser]

Re: the 589nm teardown and re-alignment [PIC HEAVY]

Looking forward to pics! My 589 is on its way from Dragonlasers.

yeah, I was running it at 5mW for a few shots and some other things earlier, and started playing around at lower powers to really start to understand it better, after optimizing it on and off in specific increments for cooling, I found a way to optimize it a bit better, rather than pre-warmed, like with a lab laser, since it is not thermally regulated. its quite noticeably brighter now, though I honestly think its better to run it at lower powers. it really is a lot less stressful on it. even 30mW is quite an achievement. If I run it at 5-30mW it can run a very long time before it gets warm, particularly under 10mW, and the beam quality gets far better. both thinner and slightly better divergence wise. definitely rough on this laser to run it for long times. especially with a fresh battery in it. the driver in particular gets crazy hot. I havn't temp'd it, but it gets hot enough to burn big time. no wonder they tend to pop alot on these higher power models. they just weren't designed to take such high current. its very much a recurring issue with these. they're nice drivers, but suspect they were only designed to go to 50mW, as they seem to struggle getting higher than that, and that was listed as the max for the longest time on the spec page until more recently it became 80mW...