This thread is the beginning of a LARGE project to acquire, protect, restore and showcase the "Video/Laser III" laser projector designed and built, for the most part, by professor Lowell Cross. Please visit this website, Loaded with great info on Mr. Cross and his projectors... http://www.lowellcross.com/home/ This laser show projector has historical notoriety for being one of the few, first laser show projectors ever made.
First off, I cannot begin to cover everything I have learned today and through research over the last couple of days to fill in all the details on this laser but I eventually plan to get to it. So, for the time being, (This space is intentionally left blank until more information can be assembled. Please check back for more information as it's assembled.)
Today, my brother and I drove to beautiful Iowa City, Iowa to pickup this laser form professor Cross himself. As seen in this thread,,, http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...read.php/13720 The laser system Was in the position of possibly being tossed and needed to be moved to a safe location until an new home could be found. Hopefully a museum.
Professor Cross and his wife were a pleasure to meet with. Very accommodating, kind, professional and informative. It was truly amazing meeting with a great innovator of our hobby, business and/or obsession.
Here are some pictures of the of the "Video/Laser III" system we picked up today.
Professor Cross with the projector beam table. I title this one "The Brain"
The equipment was located at two separate places . The controlling hardware was located in Mr. Cross's basement while the white-light ion laser with power supply, beam table and controller power supplies were located in Mrs. Cross's art studio in an old converted school house.
Thankfully my brother was there to help me load. The beam table weighs approximately 150LBS, by my estimate, and is over 3X3X1 feet in dimension. (Which is an absolute work of art, more pictures soon to come. It's still in the car.)
The whole projector system "BARELY" fit the vehicle I brought but I was able to carefully and strategically fit every piece of the system in the vehicle. In hindsight, I probably should have brought the 12' box truck but everything arrived safely after the 230 mile trek back to Lake Geneva, WI.
Mr. Cross and I discussed the cable arrangement and he and I both thought it best to leave them intact during transportation so that re-routing can be cataloged and diagrammed. This is only 1/3rd of the wiring.... Yeah.
Here are some schematics and wiring diagrams that Mr. Cross provided to piece the system back together again. Yes, this is not as simple as loading a file and pressing play in Pangolin. Not by a LONG shot. This is back when laser shows required a mathematician with a PHD with an artists hands to adjust the 200+ (waiting on exact number) potentiometers and switches.
And.... Here are the controllers.... GASP!
Here is the Coherent Model 52 Mixedgas Argon/Krypton white-light laser. This laser is an antique and... surprisingly.... still gas intact!!!
Although, it has a fairly bright orange line, which indicates hydrogen contamination, I think it will strike an arc again.... We'll see!
And finally,,, Here is the prisim which is used to separate the wavelengths of the white-light in to usable colors. At the time, PCAOM's were not exactly affordable.
This is a very unique prism as it not only separates the colors but re-aligns them into straight beams, like the fingers of a fork, versus a fan. (More pictures to come...)
Not a very good pic but... you get the idea....
LOTS more to come. It's 3AM, I'm tired and my arms hurt from moving this behemoth.
Until then, let the questions and comments fly.
Adam
UPDATE:
Here are the pictures of the beam table.
Covered to seal in freshness, and comply with the CDRH...
TA DAA!
This projector works a little different than what we are used to. The beam from the white-light is split into five lasing lines, red, yellow, green, blue and violet. The 6th channel is white that is picked off before the prism.
Once the beams are split, they are individually directed to their own XYB galvo set. After the galvos and blanking, the output is directed upwards to a positioning mirror above each galvo set. This allows the images produced from each set to be overlapped in the projection screen.
To top it all off, in front of the mirrors are scan through lumia effects. There are three separate shower glass disks that can be individually chosen in front of each output.
Here is a picture from Mr. Cross's website showing the output of this projector.
Some shots of how the lumia works...
Blanking galvos...
The X and Y galvos are Genneral Scanning G060's Anyone got some of these? We're missing one.
Now to the other side of the table...
These will show the beam dividing and routing. The prism is actually on the outside of the beam table.
Here you can see where the individual beams are picked off by the mirrors on the adjustable stage.
Enjoy!