Some time ago there were available in the Net some articles about lasers built from scratch from "The Amateur Scientist" coloumn in Scientific American. These articles included an argon laser built from scratch, a CO2 one, a He-Ne one, tunable dye one and so on. They were available until F(beeep)NG copyrighters didn't wiped them out. Does anyone have the copies of these articles to send my on e-mail?