I thought of a way to reliably focus my laser. It has been focused down to 0.11 mm!!! I might have to de-focus my laser a little so I can burn larger stuff with out the image having to be huge. I am doing full gray scale images. One of the larger images had 3.8 million lines of code..... for an image that was 200 mm wide and 180 mm tall.....
http://m.ebay.com/itm/AVI-Mega-Pixe...a-Magnifier-/291504117710?txnId=1198881145019 Truthfully a bit of both. I didn't know if anyone cared. I couldn't get my laser any finer than .15mm by just eyeballing it with a magnifing glass. I came across something that would be perfect. It is one of those palm to the head moments. A nice small, cheap usb 500x microscope. So stupid simple like a frying pan to the head. I got mine from a USA seller on ebay for $20. Link Put a piece of electric tape on top of your work piece to get rid of the glare. Make sure the scope is as vertical as possible. Works very well.
Great tip !! Thanks !! I have a 6 watt diode assembly and driver coming, this will help get the most out of that beam..
I was just looking at buying one. FYI they won't get that fine though. 6 watt laser is a 9mm diode and has a higher divergence than the normal laser diodes. I was going to ask DTR (sells them and is an expert in all things laser laserpointerforums) about them and what the divergence difference is. Basically if I can get a normal diode to .12 what will a 9mm go down to? I have a feeling it will probably only go down to .14-.15 with a 3 element lens. With a G2 lens maybe only .17. So what does that mean.... For doing smaller finer work like small detailed full gray scale images you may need to swop out lasers back to the 2 or 3 watt laser. For large gray scale images (above 10" or so) or cutting you go to the big boy. Also with a 6 watt you are going to have to move very fast probably above 4000 mm per min if not much more to get full gray scale. You will be etching the wood much sooner. You are changing scales big time. If you can't move that fast you may loose a lot of your gray scale because you will have to limit your scale to 0-80. You will have to either limit your top end though software or lower the power on your driver. See how fast your machines can actually move and then you have really compensate for whip and change in direction. Lots of things to think about.
