I'm sure TJ will recognise this post, I'm copy and pasting it from the last time I typed it out, haha. Perhaps I should make a new post with it and ask for a sticky...
Pot modding is never a good idea any more. There was a time years ago when green lasers were new on the market and most manufacturers were just churning them out without binning them. Then you could often pot mod a laser safety and get a few mW more out when you happened upon a unit with better efficiency than normal. Those days are long gone. Manufacturers bin their units now - their 1mW, 5mW, 15mW, etc models are all exactly the same inside, they just make one model and sort them by how much power they can squeeze out of it. That is why you can't safely pot mod any more, cheap green pointers are already turned up to the maximum they can take before they leave the retailer. This is part of why they are so much more inexpensive now than they were years ago. Manufacturers get tons of low output ones via the binning process.