CO2 Laser: Custom alignement system

CO2 Laser: Custom alignment system

Mirror alignment is crucial for a laser. To align one the mirrors you can simply look thought the tube and screw or unscrew the three blots on the alignment plate to see the reflect of your eye in the mirror. But to align the second mirror you need to remove the end plate with the align mirror.

     So the alignment system allow the align of the both mirror from outside the tube once you align each one from inside.

On the image above, the third version of the laser you can see on the end plates one laser (gold) and one spike.

Misaligned mirror

When you align the center of your eye with the spike and the red dot on the mirror, you can directly see how align is the mirror. On the example above the mirror is misaligned because the reflect of your eye (the black dot), the reflect of the spike and the red dot are not align.

Aligned mirror

Once they are aligned, as above, you can see that the three part are merged.

     I think we can say that system is quite precise because between the two images the mirror angle is only of 1/2 degree, the real system is even more accurate because the glass tube is much short than on the real system.