How to make a laser by yourself?

Very often in the editorial offices of various Internet publications of a technical nature, letters are sent with requests to show and tell how to make the laser itself at home. Typically, such requests arise because of the limited financial capabilities of users.

A laser is a device that emits a concentrated beam of light of a certain spectrum. This light can be amplified by stimulating radiation. Everyone knows that the laser has unique capabilities of its kind that are used for cutting, welding and soldering parts from a wide variety of materials. These unique properties are very often used in medicine and cosmetology (bloodless scalpels and laser epilators). Often such devices in everyday life can be found in all kinds of record players, printers, bar code readers, and, of course, laser pointers. It is them that we will use to tell you how to make a powerful laser.

In order to make a laser in an artisanal environment, we need the following materials:

• flashlight;

• Laser pointer (it is needed in the event that a laser cutter is made ) ;

• Batteries (best to take a powerful battery);

• DVD-RW drive.

As a rule, the drive is used second-hand or broken. It is very important - for the laser, a "cutting" drive is necessary, i.e. Such a drive, which at one time could record discs. This is one of the main characteristics that must be taken into account in order to create a powerful laser. In order to let you know from what drives, what laser power can be obtained, we give the following list:

• Drive speed - 16x, laser power - 200mW;

• Drive speed - 20x, laser power - 270mW;

• Speed drive - 22x, laser power - 300mW.

So, we told what is necessary for laser assembly. Now let's talk about what should be done to fully understand how to make a laser. Read the following instructions.

Step one

If you want to learn how to make a laser pointer, you need to follow the instructions listed below.

The first thing we need to do is to disassemble the DVD drive and extract all the extra details from it. The most important detail with which we need to be extremely careful is the laser LED. As a rule, in any DVD-drive there is a similar laser. The only difference between them is the difference in power. You can find their table at the beginning of the article. Be careful, there are two lasers recorded: the one we need, and the IR laser. You can distinguish the required from another by the presence of a large radiator. An important and necessary laser for us is more sensitive to static stress. In order to reduce the risk of damage to it, you can wrap the contacts with thin wire stubs. In this state, he will remain lying until we start collecting the laser.

Step Two

The next step in the process of how to make a laser is to remove the LED from the laser pointer and to prepare the body of our device. In order to get a diode, we can use tweezers.

Step Three

Everything is ready to assemble our laser. First, check the polarity of our laser eyelet, which we got from the DVD drive. As a rule, in the diodes, the polarity of the "languages" is distributed according to one principle. If you are not sure, you can check it with the usual rechargeable batteries. It is worth noting that the laser diode should never be connected directly to the batteries. Use limiting resistors 3-5 ohms. This categoricality is due to the fact that the details of such a sample are not linear components of the circuits and are incompatible with direct voltage. After the test, we connect our laser to the cathode and the anode in the pointer.

Step Four

We disassemble the flashlight. We take out a bulb, a reflector and a ring. In the reflector, we drill a hole for the radiator with the expectation that it "become" as dense as possible. After that, we collect the flashlight in the reverse order. As a rule, people get it right away, and the question: "How to make a laser?" Disappears automatically.