What to do with your broken tube…

Oke my tube let me down, after i forgot to check my coolingsystem… my mistake, learned to be sharp again and placed finally this watersensor. But now there is this old tube, after some fidling and crunching i could let the water out en got the back end opened. Inserted two to each other glued ledstrip 4mm red and blue, so now it is a lamp.

4 Likes

Every CO2 laser should ship with a dead tube lamp with a note saying “This is the best you can hope for from a laser tube which has been denied proper cooling.” :slight_smile:

3 Likes

It’s still astonishing to me to see dead tubes from a lack of coolant. Protection is just a pair of wires?

3 Likes

You’re definitly right… I usually checked my waterflow, but busy busy not concentrated…. And i tried to add the waterflow safety earlier but had troubles with it at that time. After this expensive lesson i found out that my first waterflow sensor was faulty. So a new one is installed now. So for the future lets hope it keeps
My tube cool.

2 Likes

I’ve seen some water flow sensors fail closed so the software never knew the sensor was bad and guess what happened? Yup, a new part for a new lamp was created. There are hall effect sensors which won’t have this problem but personally, I rely on seeing the water flow through an indicator above the back of the machine. It’s become 2nd nature to power on the machine, see my laser internal LED glow, hear the machine home itself AND see the water flow indicator turning. I manually turn my exhaust fan on just after I hit the button on the machine which enables the laser to fire.

Watch, now that I say this, I will do something that’ll break my laser tube the next time I use it. :wink:

3 Likes