ALC 60X

[QUAZAR]

I have 2 ALC60X for sale. Both are doing 100+mW. One has been extensively rebuilt and features an extended chassis and omnichrom tube. Both have multiline optics.

£125 for std one and £150 for modded one.

[JimBo]

What galvos are in them?

Jim

[LASER-AD]

WOW? They put Galvos in these lasers??? News to me!! Very cool :roll:

[JimBo]

It's probably me not knowing what I'm talking about.
I thought the image was a shot from it scanning, it's probably static ops:

Jim

[buffo]

In fairness to Jimbo, Quazar's original post mentioned that one of the lasers had been extensively rebuilt and had an extended chassis. I can see how a newcommer might read that, look at the picture with the beams, and conclude that there were galvos in there allong with the laser... 8)

Heck, there's a guy on E-bay right now that has an ALC 60 X listed, complete with a gold box PSU, fan, and cables... Only problem is that his auction identifies the thing as a Spectra-Physics 163! :?: I e-mailed him with the info, and he's going to modify the listing. (Seems like a nice guy really - I hope he ends up checking in here on PhotonLexicon...)

Quazar's lasers look to be in good shape. I especially like the top one with the larger case. Too bad the shipping from Europe to the US would be so high :cry: - it's otherwise a good deal!

[cruch]

buffo: u got an link?

[buffo]

Yeah, here it is:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=300046957832

Adam

[JimBo]

How big is the 60x and how heavy?
Would it be possible to use it along side dpss units in a rgb?

Jim

ps Buffo postage for me would only be about $20 for my courier to pick it up

[liteglow]

125hmm

That is like 150dollar ?

I always have wanted a laser like that
To learn more about them...

I never in my live seen anything else than this boring dpps units
so it can be cool to have something like that..
Wish I did have money at this moment :?

[buffo]

Jimbo:

I forgot that you are already over there! Yeah, you can use an Argon with a diode-based projector. It will add about 20 pounds to the projector, a good bit of bulk (the head is about a foot long and roughly 7 inches square). The PSu is a separate box that is equally heavy, and even larger. It will also need a lot more power - maybe 6 to 8 amps if it runs on 220V. (Double that if on 110.) The head will generate about a kilowatt of heat (or more) when lasing.

The only real problem is blanking: You'll need an AOM (Acoustic-Optical Modulator) in order to blank it. (You can't modulate the power supply like you do with a diode or DPSS laser.) AOM's are available on the surplus market - read: E-bay - for around $100. They use an RF signal to set up a standing wave inside a crystal, which refracts the laser beam slightly. By switching the RF on and off you can alter the beam path ever so slightly - just enough to get it to pass through a pinhole and continue to the rest of the projector or to be blocked by the metal around the hole. They are *very* fast, but they can be tricky to set up and align. They work quite well, however.

The other problem is that since you'll be getting 5 different lines (or more) from that laser, from 512 nm green all the way to 458 nm blue, you'll need something even more fancy if you want to be able to selectively blank individual wavelengths... To do that, you need a PCAOM. (Poly-Chromatic Acoustic-Optical Modulator) These are more expensive (figure $800 to $1000 used) but offer 4 or more channels that can be selectively blanked. So you could have control over, say, the 514 nm green line, the 488nm blue line, the 476 nm blue line, and the 458 nm blue line. (They also make 6 and 8 channel PCAOM's, which cost more of course!)

But if you don't care a whole lot about color balance, and you've already got a green DPSS laser in your projector, then you can use the entire output of the Argon (all lines) and just use a simple AOM to give you blanking. Because your "blue" beam will have a lot of green in it (because nearly half the ouput of a multi-line argon is green) the blue color from your projector will always look like teal or aqua, and when you mix that with the green from your DPSS unit the resulting teal color will be mostly green... But it will still look cool, and you'll have a lot of blue photons available for a lot less than a 473nm DPSS blue laser would cost. (You could even install a filter to dump most of the green, and just use the 488 nm and higher blue wavelengths... You'd be wasting about half the output power, but you'd get better color balance.)

Now, I should point out that you can also use a third galvo to blank the beam, instead of an AOM. This requires a somewhat complicated optical path, but it will work almost as well as an AOM will. Search the forums for "optical lever" to find the thread where Spec and Yadda were talking about this setup. (There isn't any cost savings here, as the third galvo and scanner amp will probably cost more than a used AOM would...)

To tell you the truth, if I were going to put a 60 X into a projector, I'd probably just put a slow set of scanners in there (15Kpps) and then add some solenoids in front of the galvo's to pick the beam off and sent it to various diffraction grating effects. I'd only use it for beam shows though... But that's just me.

Adam