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FrozenGate by Avery
Beam Expanders WORK !
- Thread starter Accutronitis
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Good review of the X10 BE, Accutronitis. I would consider getting one, but none of my lasers are prefab. I built all of them, besides the gas lasers, myself. I would need something that can be attached to any of them, which probably means I'll need to end up building it.
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About 1/4 of what's left of a "Thor" laser is prefaband all the rest I had to scavenge or make and the beam expander wouldn't screw onto what was left, I had to modify the laser focus housing for the JL BE to screw onto it........
After all a laser with high divergence is just called a flashlight !
In really curious how that BE is attached. I'm not certain if your using a single lens or 2 or 3 element lens but I have noticed the single G2 and G7 always have a beam coming out at an angle. Maybe the emitter or whatever its called isn't at the center of the diode. That's what I am thinking. Just that hair off at the source could possibly have a larger visible effect. Just throwing round numbers around here for illustration .2mm off center then through a lens 3-6mm away and then throwing a beam 2m your going to see an effect.
Edit. Just saw your post. I'm interested in the piece that makes a flange look where your BE attaches. Is that the Rosetta stone of adapters?
Edit. Just saw your post. I'm interested in the piece that makes a flange look where your BE attaches. Is that the Rosetta stone of adapters?
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More about the angle of the beam will be added later at the end of the post so check back in a little bit.......
That is the flanged part of the adapter that came with the beam expander, My Thor laser had a part on the output end that you could screw effect lenses into and the laser would go through and create things like star patterns on a wall, that part I'm going to call the "end cap", That cap could it's self unscrew from the focus housing (the pat you now see with the flange) and you might say that great because you can unscrew the end cap from the focus housing and then screw on the beam expander ? Well no because that threaded part is slightly larger than the threaded part of the beam expander , So I needed something to fill the size gap between the two thread sizes, Now back to the flanged part of the JL adapter, It is threaded for the beam expander so what I did is take my die grinder and very slowly and evenly ground out the inside threaded part of the focus housing until the flanged part was more or less a press fit into the focus housing and to make sure the two pieces didn't come back apart I mixed up some epoxy and put some on both pieces and I pressed them together and tada my beam expander can now thread onto the focus housing !
Now more about the angle of the beam exiting the collimating lens, The problem with (at least my thor laser) is the threads on the laser diode housing and the threads in the focus housing are very sloppy and so are the two guide sections on both ! I noticed that I could make the beam exit the collimating lens straight if I twisted the focus housing at the top one way and at the bottom the opposite way of the angle the beam was exiting the collimating lens, So what the did is take some boxing tape and I "shimmed" the guides on the diode housing by adding two strips of tape to one side of the top guide and two strips to the bottom guide on the opposite side as the top guide and I screwed the focus housing and the diode housing back together and tada the beam now stays straight exiting the collimating lens even when focusing the lens because the tape "shims" are on the diode housing guide sections (shown bellow).
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That last post was getting pretty long so I'm making a new one......
This is how the beam is after "shimming" the laser diode housing with tape on the guide sections and in just the right spots, Now the exiting beam is in the middle of the beam expander with no off centered clipping of the beam !
This is how the beam is after "shimming" the laser diode housing with tape on the guide sections and in just the right spots, Now the exiting beam is in the middle of the beam expander with no off centered clipping of the beam !
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Man I just can't get enough of this beam in the night sky using the expander ! It just seems to get thinner and thinner like a needle !
I wish I could get some good pictures of it but I haven't given up on the camera I have because it has a lot of setting that can be adjusted and now I have a tripod so I can use a longer exposure, Maybe that might help but I don't know squat about taking pictures........
I wish I could get some good pictures of it but I haven't given up on the camera I have because it has a lot of setting that can be adjusted and now I have a tripod so I can use a longer exposure, Maybe that might help but I don't know squat about taking pictures........