Hi. check this out. It's a 10 watt Argon ion laser. I once called a laser this big.

Look at this bad boy. It's a coherent uh brand which is a Us company. It's the Skylight 300 C and it dates from about 1997 and well, they don't get much better than this. And I know what you're saying Dave: 10 watts.

That's nothing. I bought a laser cutter on Aliexpress for a couple hundred bucks. That's got more power output than this. Yeah, well, yours is one of those solid state rubbish.

It's not one of these beautiful ion lasers. Oh, the reason these are so good is because they are what's known as a noble gas laser and these actually produce a incredibly coherent light source out. hence the name. I'm here a week.

Coherent, Get it? Anyway, Very coherent light source that the modern ones just can't match. This one does, Uh, about 470 to 514 nanometers. but you can get various filters in them and to do various things. And they're fantastic for physics research and stuff like that.

So it might be only 10 watts output power. But these bad boys I believe even still today. please correct me in the comments down below if I'm wrong, but they really can't be beat. One of these noble gas ion lasers for many exotic types of applications.

but this one was actually used for outdoor laser displays. Those big you know projection mapping laser displays, how they project laser onto the Sydney Opera house, the heart Sydney Harbour Bridge, and you know all those sort on build side of buildings and stuff like that and this one was saved from the dumpster. And thank you very much Daryl Tewksbury who uh here he is here dropping it off to the lab here and thank you very much because he had it in the boot of his car for like a month while I was on holiday. So Thanks Daryl! Anyway, I've done an absolutely brilliant Annpower Podcast episode.

Link it in down Below with Daryl and he talks about his time working at Laser Vision Australia actually designing these laser projection systems. Fantastic talk. So if you want to know how they actually do laser projection and those huge massive outdoor displays, Daryl was responsible for a whole bunch of those as well as designing a lot of the kit to do that. So yeah, Fantastic Talk: Linkedin down Below: Highly recommended.

So the way these things work is that they have a sealed plasma tube inside filled with the gas and just like an old-fashioned tube. Um, they actually have a filament in the end which you have to heat up. So uh, you know it takes like a minute to start these things up because you've got to heat up the filament. Then you apply a high voltage pulse across that to actually start up and generate.

uh, the plasma. And then they've got a massive electromagnet surrounding that which then confines the ions within the tube and that helps increase the gain of the laser. And that's how they can get 10 watts out of this bad boy. So we'll have to leave the tear down of this for a future video.

Thumbs up. If you want that subscribe, Click the bell icon. All that rubbish. You know what to do anyway, future video.

But the interesting thing about this is how you actually power it. And that's what we're going to tear down in today's video because Daryl also saved from the dumpster. Not only the laser head, this doesn't have any of the power supply stuff in. this is just the laser head itself.

So he saved the power supply as well. This bad boy weighs about 42 kilos. The power supply weighs about 39 kilos. The thing about these? they're incredibly efficient.

Oh yeah, 10 watts output for around about 10 kilowatts input power. Get your confuser out. it's about 0.1 efficiency, so I don't think we're going to actually fit both of these on the bench. So let me get the power supply.

Let's let's take this off. Oh yeah, bend the knees and here comes the power supply. Oh no. that's got to be more than that's.

going to be more than the data sheet tells you. For 5 39 kilos, this weighs more than the laser head. I'm going gonna snap my little piddly wireless microphone cable. Look at that.

Look at this bad boy. And yes, it comes with an equally badass cable. Look at that. So I'm led to believe that this whole thing might actually still work because I think it was pulled from a working environment.

But it's very old and there are issues with our ion lies ion lasers as they age. So anyway, let's tear down this power supply. It's a big three phase joby, so this thing has to supply up to 10 kilowatts to that laser head just to get 10 watts of light output. So where does the 9.99 kilowatts go? Well, it goes away in heat in not only here, but in the laser head itself.

so that's an incredible amount of heat. You notice that it didn't have any, uh, heat sink in on that laser. Really? You know it had no big external fins or anything like that. That's because it's all water cooled.

So this thing has some water pipes on the back. It's got all water cooling in it and this I believe is a linear power supply because the way those laser heads work, here's the Vi response curve for it. Whilst it is fairly linear except right at the extreme ends, it'll kind of just tail off like, uh, crazy. It's something that's actually better driven by a constant current source.

So once that high voltage pulse starts up, the thing it basically kicks into constant current mode and this is basically a water cooling unit and a giant pass transistor to basically give a linear pass transistor to give constant current. although I'm sure it's more than one transistor and we're going to find out by opening this bad boy. So yeah, this is a piece of work. I think I'll just do the tear down on this table so it could look a bit different to where I normally do my tear downs.

All right. Here it is. I'm going to do this tear down in 4k for those who want to Rc. Hopefully we get some detail.

Anyway, Here's the badass plug on this thing. Look at this. 50 Amp Clips or Joby. This is a five pin three phase.

Although they're only using uh, the four pins in there because they've got the three phase and the earth and that's it. And just very briefly on the front, There's nothing doing here. just got a laser on off key switch. Cpu Okay.

power supply. Okay, yes, this is all, uh, Cpu controlled. It's not just the pass transistor. as I said, it's got a little bit of intelligence to uh, do some stuff.

But yeah, it's basically a pass transistor and on the back here. of course we've got to have Ieee 408 interface. Uh, analog interface. It's got like I think like a zero to five volt input you can do like modulation and uh, stuff like that.

anyway. um, we've got some big ass ah they're broken off. Actually, those levers are broken off there. Check that out.

Oh that's gorgeous. Big ass fuse holders. Oh look at that. What a Bobby Dazzler 80 amp, 120 kilo amps, 500 volts.

Beautiful. Then we've got some other head control stuff here. Looks like we've got a couple of uh, electronic breakers up there. 12 amp jobbies each.

and the rest of it's basically just, uh, like the water cooling water in this is the water out to the laser. this is the drain. this is from the laser and a couple of the interfaces as well. You might be wondering where the power comes from.

you might think, oh, that's not. You know, that's not enough to actually come out. well. this whole interface down here.

these are actually the jacks for the interface because here, yeah, is the end of the cable right here. Look at the huge four pins. They're the main power pins that actually, uh, plug and go to the head unit and then we've got uh, some control stuff here as well and it looks like, uh, does that plug in? That's the serial interface by the looks of it. that'll plug into the cereal so it's got cereal comes over to the head.

but um, yeah, then look at that. What a beast. And then it looks like, uh, somebody's just, uh, terminated a couple of the hoses there because I assume that they can break that off and they'd actually go into there to get the water in. Now it's not gonna just recirculate in the head.

And then the remote control. Um, here it is here. We've actually got it a little. Nice little um.

Lcd controller here. the laser emission up and down, uh, menu and stuff like that. so it's all controlled. That's why it needs a microprocessor in because it can do various things.

You can tune it, you can set memories, and I don't know what light does. is that to like? backlight or something? Anyway, so I've got a date code down there december 1997 and I believe it's our 97 vintage on the laser head as well. All right, so let's crack this thing open. As I said, like, there's not a lot in here.

It's basically one big giant pass transistor or past transistor array. I expect. I don't know. There could be like dozens hundreds of past transistors in here.

Uh, to get all the power and do the constant current drive, it'll have a micro. Just a probably. you know, a date from the 90s. Um, could even be a late 80s design carried over into various products.

I would expect to see like a like, you know, a Z80 or a 6800, or even a like a simple micro. Like a you know, 8051 or something like that, perhaps. Yeah, I think it's one of these Imperial Yankee, but if I can, just get that all right, let's see what we've got here. Uh, these screws were missing, so somebody's had a go at this.

I'm pretty sure Daryl didn't. Uh, do it. Oh, another cover. Anyway, high voltage undercover and there's all our processory goodness on the other side, so it looks like yeah, we might have all our power supply stuff under like this.

half here control on the top. Um, that's all. fancy pantsy Plcc over there. We'll check that out.

Um, and then underneath all that will be all the water cooling stuff. I'd imagine we won't go into any detail on here because that's it's. simply not that interesting. But anyway, for the processor fanboys, we've got an 88 C196 micro, so that's a little bit more than maybe I thought so.

Anyway, yeah, it'll have some like interface stuff, some Adc stuff, and some serial stuff, or your basic, uh, paraphernalia and stuff like that. Although there's a large header connector at this end and this is the front panel, so that's so it says motherboard. I I guess does that go down to this? Okay, there were just two screws up here for the plastic hood and it looks like yep, oh, we're in. Check out those bad boy caps there.

So we're gonna have a three-phase uh, rectifier in this thing. Now what's going on here? I'll put up the block diagram I believe we'd have this would be our cathode transformer down here as an enormous filter box under the bottom there. so I don't know whether our rectifiers are in there or not because I don't see them. You know? Look, here's our input fuses over here.

So looking over here, we've got our black, our blue, and our brown coming in. You might know that. Oh, and our green. Our big Earth just goes over to a massive lug over here.

And of course, they go directly into the fuse holders that we saw before. and then there's gigantic. You can't really see it. I'd have to take the whole thing apart, but there's gigantic studs on the bottom side of the fuse, so this is the top side of the fuse.

Power comes in here and it goes out the bottom. There's gigantic studs there and they go into this huge filter box all under here. The transformer is mounted on top of the filter box, so like the bridge rectifier has to be in there. Um, so I yeah, I'm going to have to take this whole thing apart because that's you know, rather interesting.

I'm sure a lot of people would be upset if I didn't. You know, get all this out. I mean, we're not going to use this anymore, so I'm going to take it all apart and these are a bunch of circuit breakers that go out. This is actually looks like the output that goes off to the giant uh cable.

But anyway, we've got a large capacitor bank here. Got a bleed resistor across that of course because you don't want that beast to stay uh, charged up. You can tell this capacitor bank is delivering all the power. There are huge thick cables going off here.

These are actually going directly across. uh, the magnetic uh coil a confinement coil across the plasma tube in the head. so it like I believe like there's nothing else in the way. it just goes directly out there.

That's why if you follow the money here, one of those cables, they've got a sleeve over there. it buggers off and then go down to those uh, four giant Uh pins on the bottom of the connector we saw down there. and this bad boy here. Half a Milli Henry at 80 amps.

Thank you very much. This is a simple Lc filter. It's just a big inductor. It's not a transformer, it's just a big ass inductor in series with the output filter cap.

Nice. Turns out there is another board under this. a huge board. I can actually see down there.

So um, I like this. Somebody's put a cable tie through two holes in the board here because this is a large like 96 way din connector. so like you can really damage the board doing that so they put it feel reasonably close to there so that should aid us in pulling that board out. Isn't that brilliant somebody was thinking.

and we didn't have to undo the Uh jack screws on the Uh D connectors either. But oh there you go. Caution: high voltage Of course. there we're getting down to our past transistor boards.

Wow, is that is that the only one I guess I didn't like. Expect to see so many uh connections like big 96 way din connectors going over. Looks like you know they've got like a backplane motherboard here and going over to the the pasture. what's clearly the past transistor array and it's called a pass bank board.

There it is. So um, is that the only one? Anyway, that's I expect it to be kind of like a self-contained I don't know why they need so much. I mean, they've got a lot of monitoring stuff. There's lots of analogy actions 741s and Ln324s and a whole bunch of Ln324s along there.

Oh, once I get the board out, I can show you better up close. Looks like yeah. Base emitter collector looks like uh, and unfortunately, there's only like one screw in there. It looks like T, maybe Ti3 packages, but there should be a matching screw over there.

so that's interesting. and current sharing resistors. They've got little resistors on standoffs here that's interesting. Have they done a select on test thing or something? Fascinating.

Fortunately, it might be a bit of work to get all this out. anyway. Nothing on the back of that uh, processor board. There's no bodges or anything.

That's pretty impressive. Uh, yeah, I don't see any any bodges on this. Looks like they got it right. No workers because this is not high volume stuff.

Of course you're not gonna like if you make an error on these, you're not gonna like, uh, re-spin the board usually. Um, you're just gonna put in some mod wires and whatnot. But yeah, it looks good. Now of course I don't have to worry about this being charged up at all because not only I've got bleed connection bleed resistor across the main cap there, so I'm pretty confident I can do that without worries because it's been in the dumpster for yeah, I don't know what a decade or more.

Wow. Not even sure how this board is gonna come out. Oh okay. I flipped it around so we can work on this a bit better.

But uh. anyway. take a look at the chassis. It's all on the other side as well.

It's got all this ah, it's you. see it falling off there. all this stuff caked. I don't know what that is.

it's like it's very powdery and it just gets everywhere. Um, yeah. I I don't know. Like my first thought was, maybe it was like it was like some sort of salt build up or something like it was used in.

you know, near the ocean, in some sort of salty environment or something like that. but I don't know. Leave it in the comments down below if you've got any idea what that that is because it's caked all inside here. You can see it right up in the case at the back.

It's everywhere. it's horrible stuff. Anyway, there you go. There's our board.

We can go over here like this and you can have a squeeze around and as I said, there's lots of analog action. There's Lm324s and resistor arrays networks all the way along there. So they've got a grid arrangement for the past. In this thing, we've got various uh, test points and whatnot.

and as I said, it's called a pass bank array and you can see how we got base emitter and this would be the collector down here. The screw. There's no matching screw on the other side, so I'm not sure if that's a To3 package or not. But interestingly, I've got another insulated wire coming out, going through a hole in the board and that's the same for all of these channels.

Ah, I thought this axial component here up on these little, uh, standoff turrets here, soldered up off the board after the boards are being assembled. Then I thought these were like, uh, current sharing resistors for the individual transistors, but they're not. There actually are fuses. There you go.

It's got F on the silk screen there, so it looks like, uh, this, uh, what? probably one watt jobby here is, uh, the current sharing resistor because you need one of those, uh for each transistor and that's what you do because, uh, when you're paralleling uh, transistors like this up, you need to ensure that the power is equally fairly equally dissipated. Uh, between the transistors, you can't just whack them in parallel because they've got different characteristics. unless the uh, they come from like the same, physically the same die and they're actually die matched. Uh, transistors.

they're not going to be well matched. So you put a little, uh, current sharing resistor in series with each transistor. And that just helps when they're in parallel to actually do that. And it looks like they've got an Lm324 up here dedicated.

um, to sort of like a string of four pass transistors or four in parallel. And then they've got like multiple groups of those. So yeah, each one of those is individually fused. You've got to have that, because if you get one transistor, ah, fail short, it's going to take down the whole array and it's going to ruin your day.

So they're individually fused and having them on the turret. Standoffs like that, It means you can get in there and you can actually, uh, repair these things easily. Nice. So this array is not a hugely high voltage you're only talking about.

You know, 250 volts maximum, up to uh, 40 odd amps. So you know it's the current. but it's the total power. I mean the total.

You multiply those and wow, that's a lot. But anyway, yeah, I'm not seeing how this board comes out easily. Um, got a bus bar happening over here? Okay, so it looks like what's happening here is we've got the bus bar. Uh, this negative here.

This goes to like a metal like looks like huge chassis down the bottom, big black like whole base plate kind of thing. and then it looks like I've got this bus bar going across here. It looks like it just joins four bars which then looks like it probably runs this whole length. The board like this, which is what you'd expect when they're all paralleled up.

So yeah, how this board comes out of here though. it's stuck under a railing at the top. You almost can't get it out unless you slide it out the front. Yeah, maybe disconnect this and then slide out the whole water cooling thing perhaps.

But anyway, it's going to be interesting to see what transistors they use under here and how they're thermally coupled to the big water sink block. I can see one of the tubes going around on the top there. so how they're actually thermally coupled down to that. So but anyway, it looks like the board can't come out.

It's got a like slide out the front with this uh, black like Delrin type railing. Warning: Will Robinson warning right? So I started taking out a screw here. Then I realized uh no, this thing like comes out. There's two Phillips here and there's a reason this puppy has a handle.

so taking out those, I don't see how the board how the bottom can slide out without the board, so probably the whole thing is going to come out with the din connector. Yep, Yep. there you go. Beautiful.

Oh, that's fantastic. We've got another board underneath. Check it out. Okay, let's have a quick sneaker peek under.

Oh, we got some big ass resistors under there. Check those out. No, that's I was wrong about. uh.

these resistors on the top being your, um, emitter resistors. Your current sharing resistors down here. Now they got real big beefy ones down here. So and yeah, uh yeah.

some Ti3 transistors under there. by the looks of it. All right. this is what we came here to see.

It looks like this big plastic cover. you can see the Ti3 package is under there, so it's all a little bit more discrete-y than uh, I had in mind. Lucky last and we'll see an array of Ti3 packages and the big current sharing resistors ta-da all hooked onto a bus bar. Very nice look at that.

So yeah, that's what I was kind of expecting. I like the, uh, little ceramic standoffs down there. Check those out. That's pretty groovy.

I like that because you don't want the whole thing flapping around in the breeze. Uh, because this is fairly long. You can give that a wiggle. wiggle wiggle.

Yeah, Oh okay. Those screws I took out. They were actually going into the ceramic standoffs there. Nice.

But we're not talking about thousands of volts here. We're talking like this is like 250 volt. Uh, compliance voltage maximum? Um, so you know, not huge voltages. Yeah, so that uh, insulated wire we saw coming through the board there goes through our current sharin resistor and goes up to the top bus bar here.

and they're all just, uh, parallel like that. But of course, this is only one side of the argument, right? We've actually got to have a another side all paralleled up basically, so you might be able to see down in here. We're not done with the bus bars, yet. There's another bus bar going across.

There actually looks like it's going to connect the case of the Uh T03 and that's what we expect. A few Motorola fanboys there it is. Mji 5022s, 97, uh, 27th week 97 day code. Wonder what they're worth each? Anyway, we do have uh, yeah, the old school mica washers, thermal paste, and the resistors.

Of course they also have thermal paste on the bottom of them. But you don't need the mica washers because the resistor the case of these clad resistors is, uh, isolated from the terminals. Now, unfortunately, to get this apart, I'm gonna have to undo a screw on each and every To3 package. Ah, Bummer.

Actually, on top of undoing the screws on each and every To3 because that's what these are captive studs in the Pcb are for, I would also have to desolder every single one of the collector wires as well. I don't want to do that. I this thing's just gorgeous to look at. Yeah, so I'm not going to do that because there's nothing on the bottom of the board that's really of interest.

So as you can see, the heat transfer block is this big metal plate here and that's just got the uh, the water elements. Uh, you know, the tubes just welded onto them. So really like there's nothing under that at all. Um, so there's really nothing to see.

There's no value to be gained by taking off all those transistors. Yeah, I can get the board out, but then like it doesn't show us anything extra. so I'm not going to do that. It's almost artistic, like on its own, right? So yeah, I'm just going to leave that as a block, so hopefully you can see how that works.

The only thing extra is that there's a bus bar running from there which actually connects all the cases together so they don't they're so they're using a bus bar for that. They're not relying upon the uh, the metal of the you know this heat transfer block to actually do that. They're specifically putting in an extra bar in there just to get lower contact resistance across all the cases. So that is very cool.

What you're looking at, There is basically one big ass pass transistor to regulate a constant current through this, and they simply, uh, well, there should be one big ass current sensor resistor somewhere which measures it all Because they don't measure these, these are just balancing resistors. So there's got to be another huge you know, 20 30 amp or whatever it is current shunt resistor somewhere that allows them to then measure the voltage drop across that. And I've done a video on this. How to design an electronic load works exactly the same way.

It's just an Op amp and a transistor and a current sense resistor. That's it. And second thought, what I think they're actually doing here is that, um, because they've got an Lm324 for each one and as you've seen in my electronic uh load video linkedin up here. if you haven't seen it, like if you have an Op amp and if you have the emitter resistor like that, you measure you use that as the feedback and then you can control the current so it look they've got four lines coming out here like this and they've got the resistor r block.

They're just series resistors going out by the looks of it to drive the base of the transistor and then it just links over to the individual transistor like this. So what I think they're doing is, I think they're actually setting constant current for each individual transistor rather than just paralleling all the transistors and then having one external current sense resistor. And that's why they've gone to all this complexity of having all the individual Op amps and all the individual control. and look, they've got, uh, some protection here by the looks of it.

and they haven't Otherwise, this board would be like completely dumb ass and well, you wouldn't need all of this fancy-pantsy stuff to drive each individual transistor. So I reckon each one is set up as its own constant current load, using that power resistor as the sense element. and then each one, of course, is individually fused. So that's how they're doing it, just whacking a whole bunch of like adjustable current sources all in parallel.

So it's not just a big ass pass transistor. So yeah, these are two Ohm resistors. So they're actually using those as individual current sense resistors to set a constant current for each one of these transistors. and they simply parallel them all up.

So then you're going to share the current across all of them. So the downside of that, uh, might mean that, Well, if one of these fails, technically, then you know if the fuse pops or whatever, then uh, you're getting that amount of current less per, uh, you know, in in your entire current, going to your uh coil, going to your laser head. So that looks like it's probably with the trade-off they're doing. I mean, you know one or two of these might pop.

If your current changes by, you know, a few percent, it's not going to matter much. Hang on. Count these: 10 10, 10, 9.. What I find that deeply offensive.

Okay, so what that leaves us with is another board down in here with some big ass tracers down there. and I don't know is that our current sense resistor or multiple ones down there. perhaps? Uh, to measure that? I'm not sure. Anyway, it looks like, uh, this might be.

Oh, there's our, ah, there's our rectifier diodes. I see them. Aha. Now I see the wiring flow.

I don't think I have to get all this out to access to the filter. Okay, here, I think I've got this right now. We've got our three phase coming in here that goes through our big ass fuses like this. and the output of those fuses goes into that giant filter block on the bottom There, that's just like a mains, uh, filter.

Then the output of that comes up to these. Aha, there you go. You can maybe see. Yeah, got some uh, circuit breakers down there so they just like, look, like, you know, big industrial, uh, circuit breakery things.

Okay, like three phase breaker? whatever. And then the output of those comes over to our input rectifier. This is our three phase rectifier. I'll try and get the board out of here, show you the diodes.

But basically we've got three big diodes here for rectification and then the output of that. Which are these two bad boys? Here, They go over by those thick cables over to our Lc filter here, so through a series inductor and then our main caps like that, and then our caps bugger off. As I said before, down to those uh, terminals on the front down here, which then go directly over there. The uh, magnetizing coil is directly in parallel with those caps magnetizing coil in the head in the laser head is directly across those caps there.

All right. I've got all the screws out of here and these go down to various blocks and components down the bottom. And once again, we've got a neat little uh, pull cable tie here. Looks like we've got some connectors going back down to another level as well.

And of course, you've noticed the big ass fan down in there. So let me let's have a tug on this. There we go. And yeah, oh, forgot, a couple of screws down here.

It looks like over here, they weren't relying on the Pcb tracers to carry all the current, but you wouldn't Of course. yeah, there we go. There you go, that's under the board. So yeah, that that runs like that so you don't rely on so these ones on the Pcb might be handled with significant current, but it comes a point where no, let's use a big thick block like that to connect.

There you go to connect to those like that because you just can't get that sort of low resistance on a Pcb, even if you use. you know, ridiculous, uh, thicknesses of copper. It's just. yeah.

So here we go. It's gonna come out. We're out. Hey Woohoo! Look at that.

There we go. Oh look at, look at that is that is that our current shunt resistor. 20 Ohms plus minus 20. Oh Reefer, Reefer Caps Reefer Madness.

Um yeah, you probably wouldn't want to power this thing up after all these years. Uh, done. videos on Reefer Madness Got a 20 amp bar cartridge fuse over here. So that's interesting because our we saw our metal bar joined this before.

so it looks like that 20 Ohm resistor is directly across there like that. Hmm. Canthal? Interesting. 20 Ohm 20? Like It's just like a gigantic ceramic body with like a a conductive coating on the ends.

That's really fascinating. I've never seen a resistor like that. Hang on. I think we have some magic smoke released.

Yeah, magic smoke. There you go. What? What? I think there was supposed to be three there. I think there's one in the middle that has disintegrated.

It's just completely disintegrated. It's Gonski. Oh wow. Look at that.

You know something of this expense. You wouldn't bin it just for that. You would, uh, try and repair it. I'd imagine.

but maybe it was coming to near the end of its operational life because Laservision Australia they have switched over to Rgb lasers because for their sort of outdoor applications and stuff like that, they just don't need the uh, coherence, huh? They just don't need the coherent brand ion lasers. So anyway, there you go. Whole bunch of power supply stuff. Small frame that's called the small frame power supply board.

Anyway, I know you really aficionados have probably been drooling over that thing. Wow, that's a bit of a beast. It's a Shrek made in the Czech Republic. Hi to all my viewers in the Czech Republic, it's a bit of a beast.

It's only 12 volt. It's only 10 amp. It is 400 volts though and I know you want to see in the rest of it. Well, let's have a look.

As I said, these are some big ass diodes down here. I'll show you the side. Looks like we've got some bridge rectifiers there as well and they love how they just like big uh standoffs. They're using those as electrical standoffs to go up into the thing.

and um, it looks like this is part of the water cooling block as well. So they had to get the heat because the inlet. Again, this is the drain port on the back here. so this says from laser.

So the water from the laser comes here and you do have a drain port if you want. Actually, is there any water in there? Any water stuck in there? No, I don't think so. Um, and yeah, and then the outlet is over there like that. So obviously I enough dissipation in.

uh, the input rectifier diodes and these diode bridge here to, uh, warrant a uh, thermal block and to get the heat out and you might notice a tiny little thermal fuse just stuck on those. I've done those in like a very old video. I've used those on my, uh, solar sponge, my solar air heater. Um, yeah, it's just that they open or close.

Uh, the contacts when it reaches a certain temperature. So it's an over temperature protection. But moving right along down here. There you go.

All this goes off to our head here. and these are the big ass cables coming in and going off to the head. But then it looks like we've got a little tap coming off here on each one, going into three cartridge fuses here. And then they're buggering off.

Uh, somewhere up to the header boards up here. So they're obviously, uh, tapping off that voltage there. But um, not just tapping off the voltage. They're actually extracting some power from that because they're big ass fuses and big ass wires.

So yeah, and then finally down in here, we've got just like an open frame. Uh, power supply? That'd just be. you know, generically powering um, the bus over here and powering all the electronics and stuff like that. That'd be a mid 90s, uh, jobby.

And that's about it. So there you go. Um, I was thought that I'd have to take apart all that, but no, it's obvious. uh now.

Oh, I forgot to show you the deities. There you go. Dual diodes, Ac in positive, negative out. Thank you very much.

And we've got three of those. sorry about this dodgy camera work. Um, the other one is different. There it is.

Aha, the other one there. that's not a D that's an Scr. Your dual Sc. Ah yeah.

dual Scr. There you go. That's interesting. And yeah, they've got the, uh, control wires coming out here and they were poking up through a hole in the board.

Interesting. And yeah, these are probably just bridge rectifiers based on the configuration. So there you go. Thank you very much again, Daryl, for going to the effort to save this from the dumpster and, uh, keeping it for all that time and delivering it here so that we could have a teardown on this thing.

Absolutely fantastic. And there's even bigger ones than this. This is like the runt of the litter. It's only 10 kilowatts like there's ones that go up to 30 kilowatts and probably even higher.

And yes, I've got all the manuals uh, for these as well. and they're very, uh, comprehensive. So they don't actually have schematics, but you know, theory of operation and all sorts of stuff in them, so I won't bore you with that. the details of all those.

but yeah, absolutely fascinating stuff. That's just the power supply for a 10 kilowatt ion laser with 0.1 efficiency. that gets 10 watts out of it. Unbelievable.

There you go. I hope you found that as interesting as I did. If you did, please give it a big a thumbs up. As always, discuss down below and do yourself a favor and check out that Amp Hour link where Daryl and I discuss some all things to do with laser vision and actually designing and implementing these sorts of systems.

So I wonder how much this thing cost? If anyone knows, leave it in the comments down below. Catch you next time you.