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FrozenGate by Avery

Remember to exercise those argons!

IsaacT said:
I think you need to build/buy a remote interface to do what he said as it is only on there I have a button for it
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Yeah I realize this now. I looked up the model. Just turn it down to low power basically instead. I have a jdsu one. So it won't run without a remote. Which has all the options on it. Idle is basically just the lowest power it'll run without dropping discharge.

Also! Only run it as high as you need power for. The lifetime drops exponentially with the more power you give it. Mine lasts 10,000 hours at 40mW, but running it max current would likely reduce that to a mere few hundred hours. Most I see are designed to run at a few amps. Usually most small argons I see are around 10mW. Ramping it up to ten amps makes it overheat in my case. It's really hard on the tube. Maybe for long runs I'd keep it around 10-20mW for a good long life
 
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Mine are sadly in storage for awhile while my work room/office gets a much needed shoveling out. Besides it's been way too hot here to run two of those suckers in the house. Hmm maybe I should do a "Lasers in the Night II" this summer....
 
I was running it outside exercising it in the great outdoors earlier today. I was thinking about running it
outside at night to get some beam shots, but the bugs would probably be attracted to the glow and get
sucked in. The divergence isn't good enough to get much of a beam anyway. It measures in at something
like 1.33mrad. Down at the end of the driveway it's like the size of a basketball.
 
If mine were portable I would so take it outside and run it at night, maybe with a simple spirograph and grating projecting it on the barn from a few hundred feet away.
 
Sadly, mine is located in offsite storage; I do not have a vehicle or even a driver's license so I am not able to retrieve it at the moment. :(
 
Hmm so both my Argons have been in storage for almost three months which I knew wouldn't be a problem for my larger ML head but I was a bit worried about my smaller 2212-10MLMA head. After being in storage it did not want to fire at all. Normally it'd fire after letting it warm for a minute or two while I fired up my other one. To get it to fire last night and tonight it had to warm for a good 10 minutes and still didn't fire until after a dozen or so ticks. Time to give it a week of hour plus long burns to get it healthy again.
 
LtKernelPanic said:
Hmm so both my Argons have been in storage for almost three months which I knew wouldn't be a problem for my larger ML head but I was a bit worried about my smaller 2212-10MLMA head. After being in storage it did not want to fire at all. Normally it'd fire after letting it warm for a minute or two while I fired up my other one. To get it to fire last night and tonight it had to warm for a good 10 minutes and still didn't fire until after a dozen or so ticks. Time to give it a week of hour plus long burns to get it healthy again.
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How many hours are on it? But yeah run it at about 2/3 total current or so for about an hour. Then idle until it cools down and then measure what current it's at to get 10mW.
 
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My ALC 60X used to do that sometimes if I let it sit for 5+ weeks, it would tick away for a little while but it'd be up and running well if I just let it be
 
I'm thankful mine always hops to life first try. It's still got 4000+ hours left at nominal power. (40mW) i'm pretty religious about running it every month if I haven't run it recently...But that's rare I tend to run it at least once or twice a month anyway. It's nice and healthy :)
 
So for grins and giggles I decided that 78F wasn't hot enough in my work room/office and hooked up my 2111 series head and of course it fired on the first pulse.

I'm not sure how many hours are on the 2212 head. I guess the meter isn't too hard to get to in them but I've never taken a cylindrical head apart before. I'll give it another run at ~6.5A tomorrow for an hour and then see what it takes to get 10mw out of it.

Part of the problem may be as others mentioned in the thread when I got this head is I couldn't find the exact matching PSU for it. Even if that's the case I only paid $90 + shipping for the head and about the same for the PSU and blower. I can't complain too much about getting a working ML argon system for ~$210 even if it decides to be a pain every once in awhile.
 
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