Powerful handheld lasers

[Moontanman]

Moderation note: The first post of this thread was moved from the introduction forum thread ”BeamQ Laser Pointers Here”

Originally Posted by CraigD

Welcome to hypography, beamq. I look forward to reading about your laser exploits, and any other sci/tech stuff that you’re into. We ought to take this to a science projects or engineering thread to get into the details, but in short, in the US, laser pointers can’t legally have more than 0.005 W output. Even adding some optics, I don’t think any hobbyist work could make that burn or ignite common materials.

A typical DVD burner has about 0.245 W output. Various folk have extracted the diode laser from them and built little handheld lasers that can burn stuff using 3 V DC power or so, which you can get from a pair or more of ordinary 1.5 V batteries (AA, AAA, etc).

Obviously, you wouldn’t want to use such a thing to point at a whiteboard or play with your cats. Seriously, you don’t want to play at all with a laser of that power, but follow laser lab safety protocols – such lasers can blind you.

This company sells a laser pointer that can burn through cardboard and ignite fireworks fuses and matches.

Laserglow - Hercules High Powered Green Laser

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

here kitty kitty

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

This company sells a laser pointer that can burn through cardboard and ignite fireworks fuses and matches.

Laserglow - Hercules High Powered Green Laser

Technically, Laserglow’s “Hercules” lasers are “handheld lasers”, not “laser pointers”. It’s least powerful model, the US$989 Hercules-250, is listed with 0.250 to 0.274 W output, similar to a typical DVD burner’s. The most powerful, the $2989 Herules-400, has nearly double that, 0.4 to 0.45 W. All of them are 4.5 V, from 3 D cell batteries, the same as a large flashlight.

They look to me like nicely made, useful products, but a bit pricey for many hobbyists. A much lower cost do-it-yourself alternative is to scavenge the laser diode from an old DVD burner, and wire it into a flashlight body. The webpage has instructions for doing this using a mini-maglight, which holds two 1.5 V AAA batteries.

I think it’s a good idea not to refer to handheld lasers with more than 0.005 W output as “laser pointers”, since most of us have an intuitive grasp of the safety of these lasers which is dangerously inappropriate if applied to one 50 times more powerful.

Having a defunct (still sorta works, but writes barely readable disks) DVD writer on hand, I’m thinking of seeing if I can cobble a laser burner tool out of it. Not that I need such a tool, but having one, I might find it handy. The ability to etch neat, curving lines, or cut small plastic parts, seems a pretty good one to have.