Homemade CO2 Laser Tube

how you doing so if you poke around on youtube enough i find you really start to get jealous of other people's machines oh would you look at that yeah would you look at that we're living in the future man it's time i get with the future it's about time that i catch up so today we're gonna build ourselves a co2 laser [Music] tube so the laser tube itself will be made out of just a regular old acrylic tube with a glass tube on the inside for a laser which neither of which have come yet so hopefully amazon hurries up i don't know what's wrong with them lately i'm an american i love my instant gratification but we can start machining the end caps for it out of these chunks that i cast in a previous video so i got this thing all chucked up in the lathe this is about two and three quarters of an inch thick it's almost easier and definitely less wasteful if i just melt this down and pour it into a two inch cylinder so we're gonna do that here we go shifting gears entirely all ready [Music] got everything done on the lathe that needs to be done so now there's a lot of holes that need to be drilled and tapped in these in order to figure out where the holes go on the back we're going to build our mirror mounts now i've never cut aluminum on the plasma cutter before but we're gonna give it a whack it took three tries but after a little bit of grinding we got a couple acceptable pieces so moving right along so shipping's taken forever these days and i ordered a glass tube maybe two weeks ago it still hasn't shown up so we're gonna try and use these fluorescent bulbs as our glass tube but we need to cut these and i got kind of a stupid idea i've shorted out the leads on the power supply for the electromagnet with some nichrome wire we're gonna wrap this around the bulb heat it and then let it cool quickly and hopefully that'll make a clean break all right cross your fingers it doesn't blow up oh that kind of worked can i sand it down you can sand glass down we'll stick these pieces into the glass tube and try and pull a vacuum and cross your fingers we don't get an implosion or if we do that it looks cool that looks good enough for me i'm gonna have to replace the chair i'm sitting in there's bite marks in it so we're confirmed this tube and this setup is gonna work so now we can finish off making the water cooling jacket add our electrodes finish our mirror mounts and we can start testing so we have our o-ring installed in there and check it out perfect fit noise you know they call it a tap and die set and i very rarely use the dyes but i very frequently want to die when i'm tapping holes makes sense for my mirrors i have these first surface gold-plated mirrors those i want to at least set this one back inside of here so i'm gonna have to cut a little bit out of the middle of this plate oh my god what happened much better got all our parts built full disclosure here i rebuilt every single part i was having a real hard time getting all these put together with the fluorescent light tube without breaking it and i'm sure it can be done but it'll be by gentler hands than mine so i remade all the parts to fit this borosilicate tubing that i ordered it finally came in now then these go together like glass tube on the inside and then our acrylic tube goes on the outside and this is a real tight fit then we get a neoprene washer and then our gas fitting fits on the inside of the glass pipe like so then our mirror plate i'm gonna clean this first but that goes right on the back there all righty don't mind the clamp i actually ended up epoxying it though these are just a little too jiggly in there so we have our partial reflector installed on the front we have our mirror installed on the back now let's start working on the water system which i will do off camera i'm just hooking up some tubes to a pump i'll just have it zip tied on the side of the bucket there and it's going from the transfer pump through the system and back into the bucket very sophisticated now we got to start worrying about our gas mixture for our gas mixture if all my sources are correct i'm going to need about 11 we're going to need about 11 co2 9 nitrogen about 79 helium wait 80 percent helium so in order to get that mixture right we're just going to use a balloon and measure the diameter and figure out exactly how much of each we're ending up with in there and it's not going to be perfect but it'll be pretty dang close and as far as getting the gases this is 20 bucks at walmart helium is good for the co2 i finally did it guys no more flux core welding on this channel i got some shielding gas about dang time huh then for the nitrogen nitrogen is weirdly expensive and i didn't want to buy a whole bottle of it so i got a source don't tell on me [Applause] all right we're all set up i've tested the water system it works good there are no leaks despite my lack of hose clamps besides in the pump housing itself on a brand new pump harbor freight now we have a schrader valve on old suck boy here hooked up to this end of the glass tube and then our balloon on the other end with a ball valve so we can pull the air out of the system and then fill it with our gas mixture that we just put together a variac so we can at least kind of slow start on our supply and our power supply we're using is just a neon light transformer with an output of 10 kilovolts only 30 milliamps but 10 kilovolts that's that's your dead voltage right there so we're going to be very careful here let's do it we're going to let that go until we get to the maximum that old suck boy can provide which i think is around 27 inches of mercury we can check that this is going through and it is pressurized in there so i'm going to try and turn it on without running the water first but only very briefly laser goggles on [Music] how do those other youtubers do it nice all right starting to variac very low one arm behind the back i don't see anything you see anything i think we have a small leak all right i pulled off the insulation between the two machine parts just maybe we can see what's going on and this is full power we're arching out to the water caps so that's just been running through the water this whole time probably making a lot of hydrogen gas in there um oops three weeks later let's go many months later so much later that the old narrator got tired of waiting and they had to hire a new one of course the one time i don't turn on the camera i finally get it working let me get my glasses what either the problem is that my partial reflector was in backwards because i swapped that out a couple times could have been a flow rate thing could have been a vacuum honestly it's all up in the air i don't know why it suddenly works but vacuum pump is running and i open this little ball valve on the balloon until i see the needle move just a little bit here goes nothing [Music] [Applause] can you believe it now we don't seem to be getting any output but the fact that we even have a plasma is incredible i'm so happy so i'm editing this thing right now and i realized i never really explained how my setup has evolved so i thought i'd pop in here real quick and give you the rundown hence the robe i swapped out that little 10 kilovolt transformer for another neon sign transformer but this one is 15 kilovolts at 60 milliamps so much bigger power supply two the water jacket and the system are exactly the same but i filled it with distilled water so it's not conductive i still have the balloon but it's on a needle valve now so i can make very fine adjustments because it only takes a little little bit to get the thing going and i have way lengthened the hose because i found i'm getting funky discharge over the line if the line to the balloon is less than the line across the whole resonator if that makes sense and on the other end we have another really really long hose going to a harbor freight vacuum pump i don't actually know if that is making a difference but it's hooked up i think what really made the difference is i finally adjusted the mirror properly it's one of those you give a hundred monkeys a typewriter and you'll get shakespeare kind of things you know anyway back to your regularly scheduled program let's do it look at it it's beautiful still not hot on the outside all right i don't know if you can see that we seem to be getting a little bit of a funky discharge in the inlet port let's turn the lights off [Music] look at that beautiful well i've blown the last fuse i have on my variac so this is gonna be an ongoing project i'll probably improve the power supply in the next one so we get a better output well we have a pretty cool new light fixture this project really threw me for a loop i i thought it was going to be a whole lot easier than it was but man i tested that thing constantly for weeks and the lasing that we finally ended up getting looks good to me it looks like a clean beam i think one the laser won't run very well on an ac power supply and the raw output of the neon sign transformer is in fact alternating current so i'm gonna have to rectify that to get a dc output and then possibly smooth that with a capacitor but i don't know i'm gonna have to do more research this is going to be an ongoing project but i'm pretty happy with where we got on it now at least we know it works we know the ins and outs of how the gas is supposed to be flowing and whatnot in the next video on this laser i'm going to be improving the power supply for it and flushing out the cooling system making that a whole lot nicer and hopefully putting it in a box and making it so it can be electronically controlled because the end goal of this laser tube is to make a cnc laser machine now and also getting a beam that actually burns stuff would be nice huh so anyway hope you like what you saw if you want to get more updates on this project as they come out remember to subscribe maybe leave a like and thank you so much for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cranktown City

Views: 365,720

Keywords: co2 laser, how to make a laser, homemade laser, machining, macining project, laser cutter, cnc laser cutter, co2 laser tube, co2 laser resonator, resonator, high voltage, experiment

Id: 5zpbXpHWSB0

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021