3rd time was a charm..... except it came back on dim after my peak testing so a 3rd one is now no good. I think my large power supply may have been the culprit for killing the first two but I'm not positive.
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I bought 12 of these and I've been playing around with them as well.. what I've found so far is that all of the diodes can take 200mA without generating excessive heat (I'm not implying that they are not overdriven at that current, but rather that they aren't putting up much of a fuss) and none have hit fold back nor noticeably diminishing returns on increases in current. I do have them screwed down to a heat sink, though.
I've found the beam quality to increase by sliding up to remove after slicing the glue with a razor the final lens, then further increase in both beam quality and brightness by carefully removing the x/y assembly and cutting off the remaining metal which used to be the assembly's foundation and using the output from the prism. When I removed the prism, the alignment seemed to worsen. The red is also misaligned on my units as well, just a hair.
I managed to improve the alignment by very carefully breaking the bond to the adhesive holding the dichro combiner and slightly tilting the combiner. I think I had to then adjust the prism to realign so it allowed output rather than just reflecting all over inside the orism.
Finally, the divergence is pretty horrible due to the ultra short FL lenses they used, producing a hair thin beam at output. I may be wrong but they seem to be actually focused correctly, it's just such a small output diameter that the divergence suffers greatly.
The solution is a beam expander, when using one I'm getting a 7mm dot at 30ish feet.
One last thing, if you remove the black mask on the back of the prism be prepared to spatial filter because that mask is there to clip out a massive amount of speckle noise.
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