Mounting Mirror Mounts and Laser Mounts for flexible alignment

[tribble]

I'm collecting parts for my projector build and I'm wondering how to mount M1-style mirror mounts and cylinder-mounted diodes to make near-field alignment easier.

In my mind, the "hard" approach seems to be do a rough alignment with items unsecured, then mark, drill and tap holes in the baseplate and hard-mount everything. Then, if the diode is off in the cylinder mount, or the lens is off a little, moving the spot on the dichro is near impossible. So, we have to introduce some degrees of freedom.

A "super flexible" approach might be to bounce each diode off a two-axis adjustable bounce mirror to the dichro, but that's a lot of extra mounts and loss from mirrors, but all you have to do is tweak the bounce mounts and the dichro mounts.

There must be something in between that allows for a solid near-field alignment with some stability without a lot of extra hardware or real estate consumption.

In your experience, how is this best done?

Thanks for any tips!

[absolom7691]

This is the reason I like the brass diode mounts as well as the brass flexure mounts. Yes, they are a pain when needing alignment, adjusting screws with a hex key instead of a smooth and precise thumb-turn but since both mounts (diode mount and flexure mount) have slotted screw holes, first time NF alignment is a cake walk. As for my collimators, send the beam to a target about 15ft away and move the collimator around and find center. I mark the center on the target. After that, I put a tiny dab of light threadlocker on the collimator and do a final adjust the divergence as well as center. As for MM-1s, as along as you have a way to adjust your diode mounts, a rough alignment of the MM-1s should be sufficient. Otherwise, two MM-1s per diode is really the only surefire way, but lossy.

[tribble]

Thanks absolom7691! I am brainstorming a way to put the M1s or the diode mounts on slotted feet. I may order up a bunch of Dave's stuff anyway, but I ordered my diodes mounted and I am really worried about trying to extract them to put them in a different mount. Don't know if anyone has done that successfully... I know the first diode I tried to press in to one of those mounts was REALLY HARD and I suspect getting it out without destroying it would be even harder.

[absolom7691]

Without a press, I don't think you could get the diode out without destroying it. Even then, I wouldn't try.