November 2018 Laser Meeting Minutes

Laser Meeting 11/4/18

Entertain the idea: Split cost of Pannel saw with woodshop
consensus of committee that up to $1500 is okay. Pending more details hammered out.

Lens Consumption is too high
standardization of curriculum
practice standard job to be approved
dirty lens tube pile - retrofit tube holder from Cloudray

Retrofit Blitzen with new tube holder to test – or – “make Blitzen Cloudray friendly”
Unanimous support

showed off prototype air-assist nozzle designed by Ali (@skwurl)

Clay discussed methods for keeping air assist always partially on even if user wants it “off”
we should retrofit “not blitzen” to minimize changing too many variables at once

discussed swapping out “small” nozzle for “wider” nozzle on all machines to help with alignment issues

Laser wiki page needs an overhaul

We need a better leveled access control for small items
integrate with raspberry pi system in future
discussion should be broken out into smaller /separate discussion

PR digital media items - shoot Andrew a message on talk/etc about education videos

classes 101 standardized and rigorous - discuss out-of-band

thunder red-dot/ parts will be ordered

I’d be willing to bet with the fans unclogged/cleaned, that might be a thing of the past. At least until the next time its time to clean the fans.

@TBJK

Add a manometer to monitor fan cleanliness and operation?

1 Like

Lol or even a dirty filter switch/Magnehelic combo

Any theories on why they are going out of alignment? Is it only the final mirror on gantry that needs adjusting potentially indicating members are hitting the mirror? How often is alignment checked?

What is dirty tube pile from cloudray? Did laser get free 120w laser tubes that we will now be using?

1 Like

Lens tubes, not laser tubes.

1 Like

We’re trying to find more of the lens holder tubes and nozzles, and we were evaluating another vendor since the tubes were very cheap. Looks like the cloudray tubes aren’t the right size, so that won’t work.

The idea is that rather than teaching people en masse how to clean lenses, we would just let them put the lens tubes in dirty pile and pick up a clean one. This would at least provide some rotation. Still just an idea, since lens tubes from Thunder directly are cost prohibitive to do this ($300+ ea). The Cloudray tubes were under $20, but like I said, they won’t fit.

I’ve been talking with some folks around the space to see if we can get some machined for us, but that is a quite an effort.