For those in the UK with older Epilog machines ....

[Michael Hunter]

The price Epilog UK charge for re-gassing Coherent-Deos laser tubes is outrageous! The last quote (from 2013 and I don't suppose it has gone down) was £4,495 ($6,587) for my 60W.

Fortunately, I have found a nice man who has just re-gassed my tube for not very much more than the £1,000 I was told it would cost when the machine was new in 2004.
Interesting that Epilog sold the machine as a 60W, but the tube is rated by Coherent at 50W (a bit of sharp practice there!) : after re-gassing it apparently puts out about 55W which I'm very happy with.

The man to talk to is Paul Mason at Millennium Lasers in Neath (South Wales, near Port Talbot).
His web page doesn't make it clear that he deals with air-cooled metal tubes, but it seems that he knows them well.

Paul says he does not like the tubes manufactured by Epilog themselves, as when they fail there is usually something actually wrong as well as needing re-gassing - so if you have one of those he might not be able to help. Lucky I didn't take up Epilog UK's offer of swapping my Coherent for an Epilog tube!

My tube was giving good quality saleable work (albeit very slowly) right up until last Monday - that is 12 years 4 months of use : a record ????
Hopefully the refreshing will last me until i retire.

[Dave Sheldrake]

£6,500 for my 120watt out of the speedy, although TLM do a regass of anything up to 140 watt at £500 fixed rate (including sealed chinese tubes)

[Michael Hunter]

Until I found Millennium, I thought that I would have to go with TLM.

At the time that I asked, TLM did not offer a simple re-gas, but wanted £2,000 +/- £200 for a complete refurb.

[Dave Sheldrake]

Millennium are only just down the road from me as well :)

[Kim Vellore]

I have an epilog 45tt sold as a 45 watt machine but only has a 40 watt tube inside it. When I asked about it to Epilog they told me they measure the output and it should be 45Watts.

Kim

[Bill George]

So it looks like the price is whatever the market will pay. A. Someone else needs to get into the tube rebuilding market, perhaps the Chinese? B. Figure a way to replace with a good quality glass tube.

At one time the Chinese got into the die repair business doing machine press dies for production line stamping. If the company could afford a two week turn around and most had spares and could. The Chinese tool and die repair companies received the dies via air freight which was very expensive and return the same way. Even counting the very high shipping both ways the work was still very inexpensive. I don't know if that is still being done or not?