Medical Argon Lasers???

[platinum]

I'm curious.. Why not use fans that are mostly metal in construction and use small pieces of metal ductwork to move the air to a nice exhaust point? This would increase the MTBF of the cooling system and possibly increase the amount of time the laser could be run overall.

Maybe two 6" Can-Fans would work. They're for sale all over the internet for botanical purposes.

Just a thought.

-Jonathan

[buffo]

Hi Johnathan;

Jeff's laser was modded by someone else. The guy that did the mod used these weird 6 inch squirrel-cage blowers that had huge 220V motors... The shrouds around the blower cages were half plastic and half metal on those units. (Don't ask me why...) But yeah, that's where the problem was. The air coming out of the laser head was hot enough to melt that plastic. (Despite the fact that the air traveled through 3-4 ft of metal ducting before it reached the blowers.)

Bottom line though, you don't want to run those lasers that hot - even if you have an all-metal blower. The magnet can fail at high temperatures, which allows the plasma to expand and erode the bore. Once that happens, your laser is not long for this earth.

I don't let the exhaust air get any hotter than 165 degrees Fahrenheit on mine, even when running a full-power test. Normally I try to run it down around 140 degrees or lower.

Adam

[GooeyGus]

Thanks for all the info guys. I've been reading everything I can about the HGM5 for the last couple of days. I've got a decent of an idea of all the things I will need to do to run this thing at it's potential now.

My Plan was also to use one of those big 220v squirrel cage type blowers. Can anyone recommend one that has a good cfm rating and isn't too horribly loud? Obviously I know there is no such thing as a quiet air cooled argon laser, but I've heard some absurdly loud blower fans that moved a good bit of air, and then I've heard a fan that was a bit quieter that moved even MORE air. I guess it's all about spending good money on the cooling components.

Also, I've heard something about some HGM5's having different bore sizes than others. Is there any way to tell which tube I have? Do all the models have multimode optics or no? Also, if it just happens to be a single line unit, is it just a matter of removing a line filter to get multi line output? Thanks!!

[mixedgas]

you need 2-4 blowers depending on how you do it, it comes with a big 220 squarrel cage. Usually we add 2-4 rotron patriots, because unlike most other fans, they will work into a stalled load and they fit onto the hgm case. Usually you also want to add airflow onto the power supply caps, as the power supplu was set up for pulsed duty.

Steve Roberts

[GooeyGus]

Would it be worth the time to add or change to caps more suitable for CW? Any recommendations on brands or voltage/ capacitance values?

[platinum]

Would it be worth the time to add or change to caps more suitable for CW? Any recommendations on brands or voltage/ capacitance values?

To be serious for a moment, let me suggest a flux capacitor.

[GooeyGus]

To be serious for a moment, let me suggest a flux capacitor.

Dammit... I knew I should have built a spare. The only one I have is currently installed in my Delorean, and I promised Doc Brown that I would burn my copy of the schematics when I was done

[platinum]

Dammit... I knew I should have built a spare. The only one I have is currently installed in my Delorean, and I promised Doc Brown that I would burn my copy of the schematics when I was done

Great Scott! That's some bad luck there.

[buffo]

"Whoa, this is heavy!"
"... There's that word again, 'heavy'. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?"

And my personal favorite:

"What the hell is a gigawatt?"

Adam

[mixedgas]

Would it be worth the time to add or change to caps more suitable for CW? Any recommendations on brands or voltage/ capacitance values?

No, not really, just add the fan. It has plenty of C sub F, its the heat path in the laser needs a little help if your running CW for more then the 3 minutes of Cw its designed for. It is built like a brick $&^$house, its NOT that fragile, just its hard to tear down the PSU for a amateur, lots of little hidden insulated screws and things. Odds are the possible damage you'd do to the harness and passbank wiring going in to get to the caps wouldnt be worth it.

keep in mind although its a varient of the CW 68B tube with shorter brewsters, it was designed for thousands of shots per hour, but at a low duty cycle. CW was used for alignment and healing gum tissue and dental curing before leds. So it was ment to keep a lot of the heat inside the chassis and dump it slowly to prevent the patients from being uncomfortable. It is also very quiet and quiet is hard to do with big fans. There is a uprated dayton 4c450 or larger in the back and thats all it needed for bursts of power.
it will last a long long time at 500 mW CW. Thats where my HGM trained factory tech friend reccomends setting the limit to for show work.. They are rated to pulse up to 3.25 watts, for 30 seconds with a 3 minute cooldown. That works out to 500 mW cw.

Also get some sort of back support when lifting them, its about 80 pounds and most of that weight is NOT removable.

Steve