Hey all,
I used to read books and do reports about ruby lasers and how they worked starting around the 7th grade(mid 70's). The first lasershow i've seen was at a RUSH concert in the 80's and that was the WOW that
sucked me in to the "I gotta figure out how they did that" light. The first laser owned was a 3mW MG HeNe I found at a hamfest and of course
built the 3 mirrors on motors kit. Later in the 90's took a job at Fels Planetarium where I trained on a Laser Fantasy 5 head rainbow series
RGB projector.
That was the coolest and shortest (2 weeks) job I ever had.
At that point, I had to have a real laser projector. As I researched, I quickly learned there were very few lasershow companies willing to sell parts and that I would not be able to afford the parts they did want to sell. There was alot of trade secrets back then and no lasershow company wanted to deal with anyone not wanting to spend $100 thousand on a system. I saw Pangolin LD400 on an amiga at Fels
and purchased their demo video. Over the next 10 years I slowly
acquired parts mostly from ebay to build my dream. I also won a one year scholarship to ILDA where I learned a great deal of information about projectors, laser systems and safety. One of the best things about being an ILDA member is meeting people who have defined lasershows over the years like Greg Makhov of LSDI, Bill Benner and Patrick Murphy of Pangolin and many other laser professionals who are willing to sit and talk tech.
I now have 5 projectors working on number 6. Pangolin LD2000 is my
control software. Dare to dream BIG!!!