Yeah stainless is a real bitch to machine. Gotta keep the surface speeds way down or else you burn up your tooling. :/ Or use super expensive carbide (and pray it doesn't shatter).

Yea... the carbide shattered... (-:

My mill needs a tachometer too, but that is a project for another day.

bah! gotta move to fiber lasers ;) though the HF/DF laser's sure are fun

So I need single longitudnal mode, single transvere mode, visible (around 532nm would be ideal), and a joule or ten in 20 to 50 nanoseconds. All the fiber lasers I'm aware of (marking lasers on ebay) are continuous or quasi-continuous. And my house may be cheaper...

Super sonic gasious Florine sounds... Exciting. (-: What does the beam quality look like?

Classified. ;)

Opsec. (-:

Looks serviceable to me.
I’m surprised to find Delrin is translucent. The black delrin sheet is my favorite lens board material.

Black delrin would probably be more opaque than white. I was also trying to get reflective material, so the pump light would not be absorbed (and wasted, or put heat in bad places). The two lamps are getting about 3000 joules (total). Design goals always conflict. q-:

Well, at least you were productive!

And only minor injuries...

Hopfully soon I'll have enough light to get a hologram of Snafu.

Minor injuries? Yikes. (Says the woman who wound up being stabbed by her own Exacto knife after it rolled off her desk.)
She will begrudgingly oblige. She's quite grumpy, you know. :)

The problem is the chip are razor sharp, small, and the end mill flings them everywhere. So I got a couple of splinters.

I can get some cardboard boxen for her to lurk in. (-:

She'll chew on the boxes. And sulk in them.

Yikes. Flying needles. Just what the world needs. :-S

I used carbide, a 3/4 end mill for the big flat sides, and then a 3/8 end mill for the holes. The feed rates for hss would have been so slow I'd never have finished.

My laser is not as sensitive as a nuclear reactor... Don't need to worry about ions picking up neutrons and making a mess. Which is an interesting problem to have, sortof...

Plating or passivating might work, but even a small hole and it would probably snowball. Stainless just eliminates the possability.

The most obscure problem I've had is that I'm using alumina for a reflector, and it will turn yellow in UV radiation if there is iron and manganese around. Which is what stainless steel is made of... I couldn't get cerium doped flashlamps to avoid the UV. So my reflectors are not as reflective as I would prefer.

The real cooling loop has a deionizing filter. I'm currently using a temporary one without a filter (but filled with distilled water) for the extra amplifier because I'm not absolutely certain it will work and I hate to break functional equipment. It unfortunately doesn't take a lot of iron and manganese to do it. I found a cool paper, and its tens of parts per million.