genmitsu prover 3018.

January 27 2023 I ordered some "special Hi OD (optical density)" acrylic allegedly suitable for protecting ones eyes from blue laser light almost as effectively as protective eye-wear. It was grotesquely overpriced when shipping was included, but I cut a piece and affixed it over the viewport of the genmitsu's box. It does seem to do the trick, although it's more there as a protection rather than a REPLACEMENT for the laser protective eye-wear.

It occurs to me that I might measure the absorption spectrum of the acrylic against plain old orange-colored acrylic to see if there's any real difference, but for now it meets the need.

January 21 2023 I did a little project for Sherri. Flowers cut from craft foam. That's what you see being cut in the video below. These are the prototypes.

And here is the final product, complete with annotated color flowers and the popsicle cup made by Sherri and her kids for her departing student teacher.

January 18 2023 Now it's ready for some basic testing. Here's a look through the viewport with a piece of foam as a cutting test.

This is what it looks like when the laser is cutting that foam. The laser is the needle-like inverted blue-white cone. Notice that I'm using my phone's camera, looking through the viewport, not my eyes directly.

And this is what it looks like through the microscope. That little blue horizontal line (at the beginning of the video) is the focussed laser turned down to a tiny fraction of its regular power. Weird, I know, because it's not a dot.

The grainy star-scape around the blue line is the surface of the foam magnified about 100 times.

After a few seconds, you'll see the laser turn off, and the camera (which moves with the laser) will traverse the surface of the foam, and start cutting. You can actually see the laser itself as the blue-grey line emanating from the top of frame. You can see it because it is illuminating smoke particles. The trench that appears in the foam is the ¼ mm-wide cut made by the laser. The foam itself is about 3 mm thick, and the cut goes completely through it.

January 17 2023 And here is the prototype in the closed and open position.

January 16 2023 Next, I attach the dryer hose to a way-cool inline fan I bought. Originally intended to provide air circulation for such things as indoor Marijuana farms, it has a significant suction - so much so that it literally sucks the enclosure to the table top.

A hinge attaches the inline fan to the table.

The enclosure attaches to the inline fan so that the entire enclosure/fan assembly can be opened and closed above the genmitsu.

January 17 2023 So the next part of the project is to make a window insert out of plexiglas with a 4" (outer diameter) acrylic cylinder about 1½" long to which the dryer hose may be connected. The plexiglas rectangle should be cut tall enough to be held in place inside the window frame, and wide enough to accommodate the cylinder. This is what the result looks like from the outside of the house.

What may not be obvious is that the plexiglas is completely transparent, completely fills the opening from bottom to top, is positioned behind the bug-screen so no bugs can get in, and secured by a wooden block judiciously placed out of sight to the right of the closable side of the window, inside the inner well of the window frame.

Admittedly, the venetians could be cut to fit that dryer hose, but that's a project for another day.

January 15 2023 With the risk of accidental blindness of canine and human trespassers mitigated, I cut a hole in the back sufficiently large to accommodate a 4" dryer-like fan. The idea is to vent the contents of the box out of the house through a dryer hose.

But you also need a place for all the genmitsu's cords to come out, so Sherri helped me cut a little semi-circular notch just big enough to fit them.

January 13 2023 I must have missed the memo about the fact that the laser burns or vaporizes material when it cuts, and this produces noxious emissions and smoke. Plus, the damn dogs were coming in the office, not to mention occasional uninvited people, while I was running the laser, and this put them at risk of blinding, so better to invent some kind of enclosure.

I decided to make the prototype out of foam-core. It's inexpensive and easy to work with. I cut the pieces out with an exact-o-knife and tacked them together with crazy glue. This view shows the viewport, cut from the front face of the box.

January 10 2023 After using it as a router for a while, I realized there was too much backlash on the axes whenever there was much transverse pressure, so it wasn't going to be a good router solution for long, but as a laser etcher it seemed to hold more promise. After replacing the spindle motor with the laser and installing the rest of the laser kit, I decided it might be wise to use a mini-microscope to 1) focus the laser, 2) look at the results close-up, and 3) to "watch" the cutting process.

January 2023 It is dangerous to look at the blue laser directly (or even indirectly) while it is running at more than about 10% power, because the reflected light is blindingly intense. So I attached one of these mini-microscopes to look at the laser where it contacts the workpiece.

2018   I originally got my genmitsu prover 3018 as a "partially assembled" kit, which included a 5.5W fixed focal length laser as an option. Nowadays you have to buy the laser as an add-on: