anybody else here in WPland into lasers?

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I've loved lasers since the sixth grade when I got my first one!
For a while I was thinking about building one from scratch. Something like this one in the video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzIjiquiH00&feature=related[/youtube]

*now I gotta go read about lasers! Lol

My favorite lasers are green lasers and those attached to guns YO

Sharks with lasers are better

[img][800:536]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JZwZZvOID74/T6P6YCXx_MI/AAAAAAAATBo/sgWccuZZOTo/s1600/Pictures-of-the-day-4-May-2012.jpeg[/img]

I have a 1W 445nm laser "pointer" from Dragon Lasers.

It is not a toy by any means. It's a class IV laser, and requires proper eye ware and safety precautions at all times.

Under indoor lighting and outdoors at dusk/night, this laser produces a beautiful, solid blue beam. Even with its horrible divergence, I can light the side of a hill over a mile away.

can you tell me what it is about blue lasers that makes it so hard to collimate them as accurately as a red laser? my red and green lasers are the only ones to give me a nice clean round spot of light, the violet and blue ones are ragged in comparison.

my older brother has a pellet pistol that has a green and a red laser built into it, the red laser is powerful enough to display a beam [visible from the side] in daylight. when he turned it on my sister's cat immediately reached up with his paw and swatted at the red laser beam like it was a string.

My interest in Lasers is new though, so I don't know much...

You have opened my f*****g mind

some of us have seen those magneto-equipped crank-powered radios and flashights that work by shaking a piston magneto assembly [inside the flashlight] up and down to charge them, and other such things- so what i wonder, is why nobody has thought of making a crank-a-laser or a shake-a-laser? imagine a laser pointer that you never have to worry about the batteries going bad in 'em!

I've played around with lasers for years. A couple of weeks ago I got to do some repair work on a 500W CO2 cutting laser. That was quite a beast. The operator accidentally set fire to it while cutting 1/2" MDF. Repairing wiring is fun when all of the wires are crispy charcoal so you have no idea which is which...

out of curiosity, what color is the laser in such an application?

I want a pea green laser.

I have a Radio Shack pointer with a level on it. Go outside and paint a red stop sign. I hit one at a 1/4 mile but you have to fish for it because you cant track the dot due to the distance, but

I know you are an audiophile ab; I used to have the old cassette tapes, and using the empty cases arranged on a book shelf, you can arrange these to refract the red laser into interesting spectrals. The boy still lives.

i don't know what frequency peas are, but the only green lasers available are ones whose beams are a very inorganic-appearing 532 nanometers wavelength. they look like electric peas

if you still have your flat black friends [IOW records] that maybe you have soured on, you can take a 1 watt laser and burn holes through 'em and make 'em into a kind of sieve, maybe- if you're really bored one day. only works on black or very dark things, the light things just reflect the laser beam backwards. or you could take those clear round covers on the stops of stacks of blank CDRs, and shine a laser through those things, i imagine shining the beam straight onto the edges of those things would make interesting refraction effects maybe.

p.s.- who out there in WPland is the icecream-loving laser non-enthusiast?

It is infra red so you don't see the beam. All you see is the cut line appearing as the laser had moves past. Cutting acrylic (perspex) is fun to watch. As it is transparent you see the whole cut appearing as if by magic.

This machine is probably between 40 and 80W so you can imagine what 500W can do...
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN5CvB47fL8[/youtube]