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Holography At Home

Eidetical

Active member
Joined
May 14, 2022
Messages
191
Points
43
I have been making holograms at home for a very long time, and would encourage anyone interested in laser light to do the same. One system I set up over the years was the one shown below. It was built to see if there was an invisible crack in my '82 Bruce Gordon framed bicycle's fork, which is a long story told on bikeforums in 2013 (I'll send a link if anyone's interested).

Anyway, one can detect hidden micro-cracks in metal tubing with simple holographic interferometry. You make a hologram of the tube, look at both the tube and its holographic image through the hologram with both aligned well enough to see interference fringes, then gently stress the real tube. Defects in the tube are indicated by discontinuity in the otherwise smooth fringes. Transmission holograms are generally made for this purpose because it's usually easier to illuminate the test piece.

I used a small He-Ne, clamped the fork rigidly, used a PBS and two half wave plates to split the beam, processed the Geola PFG01 plate to get minimum shrinkage of the emulsion, and pinched the tube with a small c-clamp to stress it in the area of the suspected crack. Found nothing! Been riding that fork 9 years now.


Rogers Table Fork Top.jpg



Rogers Table Fork System Inside.jpg

Rogers Processing.jpg

Fork Blade Test Final.jpg
 





Eidetical

Active member
Joined
May 14, 2022
Messages
191
Points
43
Going through a set of Journal of the Optical Society of America just received this morning and found this Letter to the Editor about what might be the first "do it yourself" instructions for holography. Received in April and published in August 1966! The solution to online drama is delay. ;) Anyway, this sort of thing is the reason I bought 5 old volumes being sold as set decoration. I never would've thought home holography went back that far!
 

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  • First DIY Holography 1.jpeg
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Eidetical

Active member
Joined
May 14, 2022
Messages
191
Points
43
My current home holography project is to make larger photopolymer holograms. The system shown below uses a Coherent Verdi V6 laser that gives single longitudinal mode 532nm to 6 Watts. The beam is split on a breadboard 14" above the table surface. The reference beam diverges straight down onto the 6x8" recording plate. The object beam diverges into a diffuse reflector to light up the stage area under the breadboard. The hologram is post-cured in the Arizona sun for a few minutes. Pics of the image lit by laser light show the extremely large area behind the plate where imagery can be placed.

Bunny System B.jpg
Bunny System A.jpg
Bunny System J.jpg

Bunny System C.jpg

Bunny System D.jpg

Bunny System E.jpg

Bunny System F.jpgBunny System G.jpg

Bunny System H.jpg
 




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