Recently I purchased a Melles Griot Omnichrome 643 laser on eBay (as noted in my laser inventory). I was happy to find it arrived in great condition after making the long trip from Canada. I had long wanted an Argon-Krypton laser capable of producing a wider slice of the spectrum—"whitelight"—but they seem to be quite a bit more rare than plain old Argon-ion lasers, and usually more expensive. Got lucky with this one.

It came with almost everything including the laser itself, power supply, cooling fan unit, and even a printed manual. It was almost ready to run out of the box, but I needed a cable that connects the laser head to the cooling unit, an air duct, and also a way to plug it in; it draws 20A @ 240V.

First I wired up a 10 gauge extension from my electric clothes dryer outlet with a NEMA 10-30 plug to a NEMA 6-20R receptical. I ordered 25ft of 10/3 SOOW cable and the plug from Amazon and picked up a "handy box" and the receptical at Lowes. Working with these heavy, flexible SOOW cables reminds me of my days in highschool technical theater…

I couldn't find one on eBay, so parts for the other cable required a new crimper (Engineer PAD-01), a Digi-Key order, and tracking down some 18/6 SOOW at a good price. Fortunately it was easy to defeat the fan interlock with a jumper and use another blower I had for my other Argon laser in the mean time.

So after just a bit of wiring and basic external cleaning I was able to get it running in top shape. I made a new jumper remote plug to run it in constant-current mode and walked the mirrors to get the peak output up to about 83mW at max current. I figure the cross-continent shipping probably wasn't great for mirror alignment, but no worries now. The specific model number is 643-OLYM-AO3, which I suspect means it came from an Olympus confocal scanning microscope, but have no explicit specifications for the unit. I received the tube with about 570 hours on the run time meter, so it is far from new but still has great light output. Anyway, on to the pictures!

One day I think I might be interested in getting RGB optics instead of the RYB this unit comes with so that it'd be more appropriate for laser display purposes. Some folks suggest that it is best to appreciate the yellow-green line for what it is and avoid the trouble. Guess we'll see if I come across the right kind of output-coupler optic. Next project is to build a small digitally-controlled remote for the 171-B power supply.