UK Laser Meet #3

[Lasermad]

I would be up for a couple of days ...maybe one day LASERING in the club and another day working on software or something ...that could be a smaller room somewhere , maybe just one laser and we all get chance to work on livepro or something

be interesting to see what develops

PAUL

[andy_con]

i would be well up for a weekend providing its in the UK.

[Tomcat]

i will be there still wont have any show kit.. but i will have my RPL clone ( sk-y pgl 200) to play with

[stanwax]

I thought it was high time I threw my thoughts in on this.
August is gooooood for me I dont tend to go away in the summer so I should be OK whatever weekend it was. I could do more than a day of course and I like the idea of one day being to look at software or whatever but though im interested in livepro and the rest of pango, and it will no doubt influence me in the future, there really is no current relevance to me, so I think we would be better to set up a number of 'workshops' where groups could talk and learn about their own software. I would be very happy to be instrumental in the Mamba black session. Also we could have alignment, tuning or safety workshops where any of us who know about a subject could show some of the noobs some basics. I could easily set up a hands on working alignment demo that people could actually use.


Any more thoughts would be good.

And one final point or rather piece of news I think I know what the prob with the SP168 has been...
On Sat while ripping the kit down in the garage I got some water in the main connector for the head - this is the last place you wanna get water . So on Sat night after warming the external parts of the connector up with a blow torch to split it open (it was siezed solid - probly never been appart in 20 years), I blew it out with the air line dried it with paper towels etc. several times....However it would seem I was not thorough enough. The connector has black carbon marks in it where there has been some tracking the only cause of this can be the ingress of water and the fact that I can now see traces of damp in there says that this is the cause. I'm guessing that when I finally got the water flow sorted and the laser began to run for several mins - instead of seconds - this damp being warmed by the 25-30 of current passing through the cables decided to make the inside of the connector sweat. As soon as this occured and it shorted the breaker on the 265 flipped and following this the breaker on the distributon also tripped. As the breakers tripped quickly and there was no flash and a bang I am hopeful that there is little or no internal damage to the exciter. I will clean it all out tomorrow examine, and test electrically then test it hooked up to the head.
Top and bottom is it looks good that the big beast will make a return to leicester in working order for the next meet, not that I doubted this for one moment - Andy better start working those muscles in preparation.

Rob

[carmangary]

You guys should consider having the next UKLEM in Pflugerville, TX. I think that would be a good idea.

[stanwax]

hehehe

Might I sense that you could be persuaded to attend Gary ?

Rob

[carmangary]

I'd definitely go!

[Laserman532]

I thought it was high time I threw my thoughts in on this.
August is gooooood for me I dont tend to go away in the summer so I should be OK whatever weekend it was. I could do more than a day of course and I like the idea of one day being to look at software or whatever but though im interested in livepro and the rest of pango, and it will no doubt influence me in the future, there really is no current relevance to me, so I think we would be better to set up a number of 'workshops' where groups could talk and learn about their own software. I would be very happy to be instrumental in the Mamba black session. Also we could have alignment, tuning or safety workshops where any of us who know about a subject could show some of the noobs some basics. I could easily set up a hands on working alignment demo that people could actually use.


Any more thoughts would be good.

And one final point or rather piece of news I think I know what the prob with the SP168 has been...
On Sat while ripping the kit down in the garage I got some water in the main connector for the head - this is the last place you wanna get water . So on Sat night after warming the external parts of the connector up with a blow torch to split it open (it was siezed solid - probly never been appart in 20 years), I blew it out with the air line dried it with paper towels etc. several times....However it would seem I was not thorough enough. The connector has black carbon marks in it where there has been some tracking the only cause of this can be the ingress of water and the fact that I can now see traces of damp in there says that this is the cause. I'm guessing that when I finally got the water flow sorted and the laser began to run for several mins - instead of seconds - this damp being warmed by the 25-30 of current passing through the cables decided to make the inside of the connector sweat. As soon as this occured and it shorted the breaker on the 265 flipped and following this the breaker on the distributon also tripped. As the breakers tripped quickly and there was no flash and a bang I am hopeful that there is little or no internal damage to the exciter. I will clean it all out tomorrow examine, and test electrically then test it hooked up to the head.
Top and bottom is it looks good that the big beast will make a return to leicester in working order for the next meet, not that I doubted this for one moment - Andy better start working those muscles in preparation.

Rob

ROB!!!! You are talking about the connector on the head...correct??? you have some major problems there. YOU MUST REPLACE the oreo slices (the two plastic parts that hold all the pins) what happens is that the carbon traces can never be removed unless you sand them flat. Depending on where the arc traces are...you could blow your passbank. I am amazed it didnt BOOM on start pulse! Sorry about your problem mate, thats not a good one because the parts are hard to come by.

pat b

[Laserman532]

You guys should consider having the next UKLEM in Pflugerville, TX. I think that would be a good idea.

Pflugerville, haha...my parents live in Temple, I worked at the Western Auto in temple from 1975 till 1978

[stanwax]

Pat
I suspect it didnt boom on start as It was dry inside the connector at this point. There must have been some moisture in the umbilical sheath as the connector was bone dry - I checked this and dried it thouroghly and between all the cables as far as possible up the umbilical. This has to have been caused by water and the only place it could have gotton to the connector was if there was residual moisture in the sheath. So when I set up, the laser would fire but we had water flow issues that meant it would only run for a few moments at a throw.
Eventually we got water flow sorted and the head fired up. It ran for maybe 5 mins it may be more - It didnt seem longer than that. As I said I suspect that there must have been moisture in the sheath that then sweated to form the droplets that caused a short that shut it down by flipping the front panel breaker. On trying again the mains breaker flipped so I didnt get as far as the start pulse after that. I hope this makes sense.

So I need to strip the connector out and examine the slices? I could not see any actual arc traces when I examimned earlier, though I would be lying if I said I had examined it thoroughly at this point. It was more just a general black dusting on the cable insulation and the insides of the amphenol connector shell halves. I will take a proper look tomorrow and look for the slightest run of arc trace - hell there must be one as it did obviously short out! I knew this was a bad bad thing to get the connector wet - In transit the water and the power connector are always sealed in separate bags and put as far away in the case as I can get them to keep them from coming into contact.
If it didnt see a start pulse - which it didnt in the wet state (I had a pretty good idea of the consequences of that occuring) then what are the key things appart from the oreo slices that I need to pay particular attention to?

Thanks for the heads up - despite it being bad news - I would rather know what Im in for in advance than find out the hard way and have to try and catch the bits as they fly past my head !

The Irony is that the outer sheath has NEVER been properly anchored into the conector housing - hence how I was able to get water in there, so I had taken the opportunity to close this off properly and had pushed the outer sheath into the rubber boot on the connector housing to seal it all for the first time since ive owned it! I guess there may have been a chance of that moisture venting and not getting to whrere it did if I had left it open -

Rob