I miss ion's. There is still no better beam than a couple of watts of white light.
All of the Chinese blues I have seen have terrible stability issues. The solid state blue is awesome but nichada are still really proud of them.
As far as 3phase and water are concerned most commercial venues have this. Water can be tamed with bladder tanks and pumps, this eliminates the toilet flush - loose the laser problems. If you have to you can rent a nice generator for clean 3 phase (whisper watts rock!).
Speaking of an old school ion trick. Have any of you used the car battery on the cathode heater to alleviate over pressure in a tube? Darndest thing I have ever seen.
When I was at the planetarium many many years ago one of the lasers went over pressure and had terrible color.
Toby went out and got a car battery and some jumper cables. He then disconnected the heater cable and clipped the jumper cables to the laser and the positive on the battery. Then he touched the negative and the heater got real hot very fast once it got to a certain point the gas in the tube around the coil ionized, then he disconnected the bat and let it cool. He repeated this 6 or 7 times then reconnected everything and fired up the laser and the color balance was MUCH better. He left the laser on full blast for about a week and he got the gas pressure to a usable level.
This got us by for a couple of weeks until a new tube could get shipped.
So the moral of this story is if you can't get your ion running all you need is a jump with a car battery.
Chad
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.