I have Bought a 445nm 9mm 3W laser diode, housing, G2 lens and X-driver from DTR's lasershop. The only laserexperience I have was building a red DIY laser bought on Ebay from korea.
I decided to use a cheap pocket lamp as housing and turn/mill the cooling head myself. The first thing I did was to reverse engineer the pocket lamp so I could be sure everything fitted together. The juice is delivered by two 950mAh LiIo batteries. Today I played with it a lot and I think that the batteries was finished after less than 15 minutes. But thats OK. I have tested the diode before installing it in the housing and I think that the little coil and the chip gets pretty hot so i installed small aluminium plates to act as heat sinks. Unfurtunally I bored the hole for the laserunit a little to big so I have glued the laserunit to the cooling head with thermal epoxy. Now I will hope that nothing breaks because now the lasermodule cant be removed without destroying it.
The drawing was done in Autodesk Inventor.
A few hours ago the laser thingy was finished and it workes fantastic. Now I see why they say lasers are dangerous. It penetrates and burn almost everything.
I tried to take a beamshot and I think it worked out OK. The dot is not round. At first I thought it was defect but the owner of DTR's lasershop wrote to me that it was normal and I have later read a few threads about powerfull laserdiodes and they all have rectangular dots.
It has been very rewarding to make such a powerfull laser and the result is beautifull. I already love lasers a little bit
I decided to use a cheap pocket lamp as housing and turn/mill the cooling head myself. The first thing I did was to reverse engineer the pocket lamp so I could be sure everything fitted together. The juice is delivered by two 950mAh LiIo batteries. Today I played with it a lot and I think that the batteries was finished after less than 15 minutes. But thats OK. I have tested the diode before installing it in the housing and I think that the little coil and the chip gets pretty hot so i installed small aluminium plates to act as heat sinks. Unfurtunally I bored the hole for the laserunit a little to big so I have glued the laserunit to the cooling head with thermal epoxy. Now I will hope that nothing breaks because now the lasermodule cant be removed without destroying it.
The drawing was done in Autodesk Inventor.
A few hours ago the laser thingy was finished and it workes fantastic. Now I see why they say lasers are dangerous. It penetrates and burn almost everything.
I tried to take a beamshot and I think it worked out OK. The dot is not round. At first I thought it was defect but the owner of DTR's lasershop wrote to me that it was normal and I have later read a few threads about powerfull laserdiodes and they all have rectangular dots.
It has been very rewarding to make such a powerfull laser and the result is beautifull. I already love lasers a little bit
