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All Fired Up! Some shots of the plasma. :)

A project log for Low Cost CO2 Laser Build

Goal: To assemble a working CO2 Laser from a minimum investment using only tools one can find at your average home improvement store.

thundersqueakThunderSqueak 10/10/2014 at 06:350 Comments

Just thought I would post an update to this build as well as post some images of the plasma.

The first image is what happens when you have a leak, the tube glows a very bright purple and the plasma fills the chamber. This is a bad sign and meant that I had to check every seal to find the leaks in the system.

After some tinkering to check all the seals, this was the result and what I wanted to see ^^

The plasma inside was a shade of pink, which was so bright I had issues taking an image to post here. My camera kept dimming itself to compensate.

Some of the issues I have found are the inner chamber cracking where the tube reaches the end of the water cooling jacket. This was solved by slowly powering up instead of a more "instant on". The bright flash of light and small explosion scared me the first time ^^;;

The laser itself does function and I wish to continue working on this project as I have time, as of this writing, the ternary computer project has most of my attention.

In other news, I have also received a number of different optics to experiment with at a future date as well as am considering building a much larger CO2 Laser.

Thank you everyone! :)

~ThunderSqueak

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