Newbie Intro

Hello,

A friend forwarded a recent CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO announcement regarding
adding a 10 watt laser to a mill. So I have added this list to my
growing list of lists.

I am an electrical engineer and an optical engineer. I also do as much
programming as necessary for diagnostics and demo of whatever I design.
I try to stay away from the infinite programming required to make things
friendly for the final user.

Over the last 6 years I designed the optics for several UV abd IR laser
micromachines. These are large CNC machines with focused laser energy as
small as 1 micron diameter.

Excimer UV laser focused to 5 microns was used to etch dots on diamond.
These dots were used to produce dot matrix and vector text and drawings
from GIF files. The target was usually the girdle of a diamond.

The girdle is the 200 micron (0.2mm or 0.008 inch) wide band around the
diamond where the mounting prongs grab it. The diamond marking machine
could write 5 lines of text around the entire circumferance of the
diamond. Large text could be seen with a 20X jewelers loupe so the owner
of the diamond could read serial number or other ID info.

I am in the process of designing a 10 watt CO2 laser as an accessory for
my Sherline 5410 (metric 5400) CNC mill. Don't know when it will be
complete cuz I keep getting distracted by other projects. My laser
accessory project would move to a higher priority if I thought there was
a hobby or commercial interest.

I am very interested in the details of the laser accessory recently
discussed in this list. I may even be able to find or interpret some
info on the laser or delivery optics.

Tom Hubin
thubin@...