Gratings! Who sells them?

[masterpj]

I'm definitely buying a box of that whitemore glass when I'm back in the states (whenever the borders open again someday).

I reckon shipping it is too risky or expensive (with a potential chance of recieving shards only.

All the stuff on spectrabeam is really expensive and always found most of it's pricing hasn't really kept up with the times

[kecked]

I'm definitely buying a box of that whitemore glass when I'm back in the states (whenever the borders open again someday).

I reckon shipping it is too risky or expensive (with a potential chance of recieving shards only.

All the stuff on spectrabeam is really expensive and always found most of it's pricing hasn't really kept up with the times

they still sell ld2000 systems terminated by pangolin!

[icecruncher]

I have been looking recently and tried to reach out a few directions with VERY LIMITED results. so, I contacted ultimate kaiser on here last week about this. He directed me to the only place I could really find them also, Thor Labs.

Very pricey but excellent quality. (Over $100 for what you want)

So back in the day there was a group buy on diffraction gratings from Dragon Lasers. I contacted them this week, they haven't sold them in many years, but at the time there were basically two style and two types.

Reflective or Transmissive. (basically like a mirror, reflects or like a sheet of glass, is see through)
and there were two styles

Matrix, which gives a bunch of dots in a pattern. or
Fan, which gives you a source point that they all eminate from

That group buy offered reflective fan and reflective matrix and transmissive fan and transmissive matrix but as I said Dragon lasers isn't producing them anymore but if you find some, that will likely be what is available.
I would love to find a less pricey source than Thor labs.

[VDX]

... AFAIK there were some pretty easy DIY setups with sanding and/or surface remelting acrylic sheets ... another type was remelting coarse glass-dust on a glass surface ...

Viktor

[kecked]

... AFAIK there were some pretty easy DIY setups with sanding and/or surface remelting acrylic sheets ... another type was remelting coarse glass-dust on a glass surface ...

Viktor

there is always chocolate. Saw a YouTube video where planters madegratings from chocolate. Wonder if we can copy some glass gratings into plastic?

thininking of David’s point use scanners. Might play with making faked gratings frames this weekend. Should not be hard. The hard part will be getting the fade from the center right. Will also make with and without the central hot spot.

so lines, circles, arrays. Anything else? Sounds pretty much like stock beam show frames but with chromatic dots.

ill see if I find my gratings then photo and trace it? Might work. Prob better to draw by hand.

[mixedgas]

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware...e/Gratings.pdf

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware...lygratings.htm

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware.../maschado.html

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware..._standard.html

The Genius of Peter Mayer's gratings are amazing.

Last I heard, the distributer was Laser World.. You can pry my Polysector 20s from my cold dead hands, for a very steep price...

These are nice for low density effects, and you can do similar things with low LPI chrome Ronchi gratings from Edmunds.. You can also seed beams from one of these into other transmission gratings for the multiplier effects. Especially if both gratings can spin, you can get really neat scan patterns.

https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/trans...litters/12295/😊

I'm not a big FAN (pun intended) of DOEs, but they are out there for short throw stuff, and this is not the only vendor..

https://holoeye.com/diffractive-opti...-doe-plastics/

CALCULATOR:

https://ibsen.com/wp-content/uploads...rVisualv5.html

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fro...n+grating+1000

cheap copies of a certain German artists works:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2pcs-Star-D...UAAOSwTM5Y05IJ

There are other ways ...

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...4aAk3hEALw_wcB


Group buy from Peter? He used to do that.. Would probably (gag) need to get LPF involved to get the costs down...

Steve

[dkumpula]

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware...e/Gratings.pdf

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware...lygratings.htm

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware.../maschado.html

http://www.creativelaser.de/hardware..._standard.html

The Genius of Peter Mayer's gratings are amazing.

Last I heard, the distributer was Laser World.. You can pry my Polysector 20s from my cold dead hands, for a very steep price...

These are nice for low density effects, and you can do similar things with low LPI chrome Ronchi gratings from Edmunds..

https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/trans...litters/12295/😊

Yeah, at ILDA's 2019 meeting I spoke with briefly with Tim Walsh (LaserSpectacles) and Greg Makhov about potential grating suppliers. (One of the joys of being part of the small laserist community is that the genius/leaders in the field are accessible to even hobbyists like myself.) They thought Spectrabeam.de was still one of the few providers of quality gratings at a semi-reasonable price. I've seen some decent polycarbonate gratings in a lumia wheel from China and another 'laser sky' device I recently disassembled, but I don't know their supplier. I even saw one effect in an LK-PD3 from LaserKing that had two gratings combined for a nice effect. There must be a low cost supplier somewhere in China/Hong Kong/Taiwan. I wish I could read/speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese. . .

-David

[mixedgas]

David...

Just search for DOEs on Alibaba if you want cheap..

Diffractive Optical Element

There is a supplier from Israel on Ebay that sells grating sheet by the roll.. He has dense, moderate, and cross, I like it, but he's into high LPM counts...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Diffraction...4AAOSwWxNYosl8

You can get a Hoya star filter for 20$... In a mount..

I miss the old days of going to ILDA and Laser-FX

The reason why all of us old timers have these gratings is Peter would bring a suitcase of them through customs and sell at his cost to more then pay for his conference trip.
All he would have to do is walk in, and get flooded by people.

Spectrabeam has to charge a huge markup due to German business taxes...

Germany, the home of the 2 Kilobuck bounce mirror...

If your brave and don't mind the power loss, you can shoot your own gratings using photopolymer, holographic film or Litiholo. It is also possible to make a decent "contact" print of a master, but you need a stabilzed laser for that. Building a stabilized Littman-Metcalf laser for holography using a laser diode is about -300$ out of a block of aluminum and a MM1.
The good effects are copyrighted, so be careful about copying gratings (No, I didn't copy the good ones, just my own)

You can even laserprint DOEs by sending out to a shop that has a 24000 DPI laser printer for chip masks, costs about 85$ to print a plastic film master. I've done that... If you want a 4x4 chrome master on quartz or glass, it is about 450$ to print one. Some of us still innovate when we can't get what we need..

If you get the right stained glass four faucet prism, and flood it with the center illuminated, you can then shoot your own burst grating in small spots on the right transmissive film. I've done it at work multiple times for a prof who needed a quick way to test his liquid crystal based films... Best five bucks I've ever spent for research.. Air Force research was amazed, as usually they needed a complex muti-beam setup on an optics table, but I shot the grating with a DPSS pointer after a long warmup time. The four faucets make the multiple beams for you.

https://www.glasshousestore.com/prod...d-jewel-50-mm/

There is yet another way to make effects using carefully designed films laserprinted at home:

Its complex to do and needs a stable table or home made optical rail, for making the master, and your projector will need an array of four big single element lenses in series, but you want to find a very old book:

Kallard, Laser Art and Optical Transforms..

Kallard has done all the lens math for you, and with Paintshop programs to make the masters, his method is probably amazing today. Kallard's transforms are pretty much pre-galvo Era.

Found it in the local university library when I was a senior in high school, when Laserium was not interested in showing anyone what was in the file cabinet looking thing in the corner of the planetarium.

No, Swami, NOT another product...



Steve

[icecruncher]

Thanks for all the links, Steve & David.

Personally, I would stick with glass mounts and stay away from the plastic ones for anything permanent mounted. They are great for a quick look but otherwise not so good, imo.

[mixedgas]

That is funny, the 30 year old planetarium projectors all have plastic gratings. I guess we will have to agree to disagree. 😊

Now if we could get Pangolin to stock Polysector gratings. I'll email Bill...

Edit, I emailed Bill.

Steve