"The Quest for the Copper Vapor" - Oregon to Massechusetts and back.

[300EVIL]

I'm camping in my van in Spokane. It's dumping snow and I barely made it here. Ideally, I'll just drive off in the morning, but that sounds too easy. I'm parked near 1st avenue, right next to a bridge downtown.

If anyone's in the area and wants to drop in, feel free to call. :-)
(5o3.999.8o25)

-Jonathan

Hey Man!
I had a feeling you were gonna get a little stuck up in em hills. At least you made it to Washington. You're almost there!
Good Luck!
Adam

[300EVIL]

We say our good by's to NYC around 4:30AM and start heading for our stop, BMI in Massachusetts. This is where it starts getting crazy. So, we are about 5 minutes outside Manhattan when this car comes flailing around us at like 90MPH! Luckily Jonathan saw him coming and was able to avoid him hitting us by inches! He ducks into our lane violently fishtailing. The vehicle is spraying parts from the front and rear! Shit is flying everywhere.

We proceed to chase this asshole and get his licence plate with my camera. (We have some good chase scene footage comming soon.) Next thing you know this other car that was chasing this guy is driving insane too and clips our passenger side mirror! We try to keep up in the van but the roads were too dangerous for that kind of driving.

After that whole fiasco, our adreniline was pumping. We drove another 30 minutes or so and started to get really tired. We ended up pulling over in a parking lot and got 2 hours of much needed sleep.

The morning was pretty uneventful after driving through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pensylvania, and New York the previous day. We still had to drive through Conneticut, Rhode Island and finally Massachusets. That's 10 freakin states!

So, we finally get to BMI around 10AM. There we met a couple of very nice people and proceeded to check out this CVL.

THIS THING IS A MONSTER!

I swear I almost messed my pants when I saw this thing!

First thing I did was look down the huge 40mm bore to see if the optics and bore were intact. They sure were! Clean too. Then I immediately proceeded to the thyratron tank to see if it was gutted. Sure enough it was all there!

Other than a few minor scratches on the exterior, the inside of the power supply and the laser head was MINT!

Now the fun part.... Getting it in the van.

Yeah, it 's that big!









The only way to get this head in the van was to remove the front passenger seat. Luckaly Jonathan had a tool set he purchased during his alternator ordeal and had a socket just big enough to unbolt the seat from under the vehicle.

At this point I'm freaking out because it doesn't look like their is going to be any room for a passenger and If their was, the vehicle would end up a total death trap.

Since the umbilical cable was basically hardwired to the PS, we decided the best route was to leave it intact. We carefully fork lifted the PS into the van and then snaked the head in. I can't believe both Jonathan and I lifted this thing. It's like 500LBS+!







We finally figured out the seating arrangement and I was totally not interested in sitting next to that 600LBS wreaking ball of a power supply.



Thankfully Jonathan volunteered to sit back there with that thing while I drove back to Wisconsin.

The story continues....

[mixedgas]

is that a norseld head in the asculap? They just rebrand other folks products.

if so I may have a few megabytes of pdfs you'll need.

Steve

[smogthemog]

In that case Steve I hope it is a Norseld head
You can't beat a shed load of reference literature - one thing I didn't have too much of with the ALC68!

It's good to know of a source, thanks, but until I get it I actually don't know what tube is in it It does however have Meditec written on the casing, does that tell anything?

Thanks

Jim

[300EVIL]

After getting the behemoth CVL in the van,,,, in one piece, both Jonathan and I were very happy. We padded and strapped the hell out of it to hopefully ensure it woundn't kill us. From there we had time to look around BMI for a few minutes to see what they had.

Sorry guys.... No cameras allowed in the building. I'll tell ya though... It would give any nerd here a major "LAZORGASIM". Not only did they have stacks upon stacks of Argons, YAG's, Eximers and CO2's they also had stacks upon stacks of cool scientific equipment. My eyes wandered so much they hurt! Every direction was filled with cool stuff. If I could stay, I'd never leave!

Have you ever seen a barrel filled with MM2-1A's? I have! Both Jonathan and I identified parts that were supposed to be NASA satellites and things made of stainless that should be works of art. You could point out a piece of equipment and say, "Oh yeah, $1M+ to build that!" I swear the equipment in that warehouse was once worth a BILLION or so. I'm seriously NOT KIDDING!

Anyway, I'm currently broke right now but I did happen to purchase a Cyonics argon head and power supply for a good price. I just finished rebuilding the head and the tube is brand new! I'm currently getting 28.5mW of single line 488nm from it at full current, around 8A.









On top of all this cool stuff we managed to procure a shit load of borocilicate lab glass. They showed us a shelf and said, "Take as much glass as you want." We wiped them out! Now, ofcourse this looks really bad if we got pulled over by the police. It would have looked like a rolling meth lab along with a death ray cannon of a laser! So what! It was a thrill!

Here is the glass I kept. Platimum also took some back with him.



LOL!



So, from there we hit the road. The vehicle heald the weight okay and didn't feel too stressed. We we're on our way back west again.

About 3 hours into out trip. Jonathan decided to give James a call and see if we could stop by. He invited us to stay over and have a mini-LEM! We arrived at James' house at about 1AM Ohio time and spent hours talking about lots of stuff and drank some beer that James had.

I also spent some time re-aligning James' gas rig which was a little off since SELEM.



We stayed up until about 5AM and had a great time. James is a real upstanding guy. He offered to have us stay at his house, which is quite nice I must add. He set us up with places to sleep. I got the bed! Jonathan got the couch. We flipped a coin for it. I'll tell ya, it was like staying in a 5 star hotel. Thanks a lot for the hospitality James!

More stories to come! Stay tuned!

[300EVIL]

UPDATE:

Jonathan is finally back home with his laser in one piece! He should chime in shortly. Glad to hear you made it back okay man. We had a great time!

[Laser Ben]

Must have been an interesting trip considering their website says they are located in the middle of the Atlantic!

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp...=17&submit.y=6

[300EVIL]

Must have been an interesting trip considering their website says they are located in the middle of the Atlantic!

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp...=17&submit.y=6

Oh! I forgot to mention the ship! That's weird, guess google maps is messed up.

[James Lehman]

Thanks a lot for the hospitality James!

Thanks for stopping by! I had a great time.

Good to hear it all went very well.

I'd like to see some of the video you got.

James is a real upstanding guy.

Yeah, until I fall down!

James.

[platinum]

The rumors are true, I made it back!

What a .... QUEST! I had a feeling naming it as I did would somehow make things difficult. I think I saw something like 10 semis and 60 (yes, 60) vehicles in ditches over the whole trip. Fortunately, the CVL weighs over 1000 pounds so I had an advantage in the ice and snow.

Speaking of snow, I woke this morning to snow.. LOTS of snow. After knocking some snow away from one of my doors from inside, I borrowed a shovel from a guy at a parking garage near where I parked. When I returned to my van, I noticed that a nice young woman had stopped her car and was in the process of photographing my van with her cellphone camera. Hindsight is 20/20.. why did I not give her a card and have those pics emailed to me? ..probably because I had an insatiable desire to get back on the road for fear of being just late enough to get stuck in another foreign city. Apparently, the sight of my van buried in snow warranted a picture.

I'm sort of glad I was stuck in Spokane as I was completely exhausted from driving from Wisconsin with only an hour nap in N. Dakota to operate on.

A big THANK YOU to Adam (300EVIL) for going to such great lengths to help make this all happen for me. Without his help, I'd probably be back here in Washington empty-handed.

I also want to thank Steve for pointing this laser out and providing me with some galvos that can handle the giant mirrors I'll need for the 40mm beam it's going to output.

Also, thanks James for having us over the other night(s). It was good to take a break and what better way to do so than have a LEM!


=More later=

-Jonathan