I tried to respond to this in Zachs thread but the system would not allow me to.


Quote Originally Posted by Lazerman121 View Post
Ok so yesterday I finished my laser I was building and it died here is what I did

After I finished the laser I set the driver to 250mA ...

.[do you mean you set he driver at 250mA and then finished the laser? As I dont think you can set/measure the current after the diode is connected to the driver and adjusting the pot on the driver after the driver and diode are connected by looking at how bright it appears or buy burning a match may not be the best way. I feel bad that the diode you got from me died but I am not totally sure why this happened. If I could see the lens that you used and got from me I may be able to tell if you got a glass lens made for red diodes by mistake. please send both the lens and diode to me and I will do all I can to help}


and then connected the laser diode and turned it on the laser and it lased at like less than a mW so I slowly turned up the diode control until the laser lit an when it did it was super bright. Nowhere near one watt much lower.
so after that I turned it off and about ten minutes later I turned it on and lit a match with it at the focal point lit a match with it to test the power.
later I turned it on again aimed it against the wall and slowly turned it to focus it into a beam but as I was turning the lens a hug black spot formed in the middle of the dot on the wall.
After looking at the diode it looked like this http://82.69.127.162/images/lazor_im...Window_PHR.jpg
only on mine the window was also cracked up.
I was told to fix it I would have to decan it but when I tilted it the hole fricked window fell into the diode and then fell out when I tilted down.
now the diode emits very little blue light and even a small line of green ??
I was told static killed it but I do not believe that for one second.

after talking to some people I have found out that the AR coating is missing on the bottom concave lens that faces the diode.
so for now I guess I am screwed.

the driver I used was this
http://www.ultralasers.com/proinfo.p...age=1&featured
and I used an N-Type ham radio dummy load for heat-sinking

At SELEM a guy offered me another 445nm diode for 4 laserbugs I won in a raffle
now i regret not accepting it.