Darren Null
08-26-2007, 11:50 AM
In my Mercury manual, right at the start, there's a bunch of warnings about what not to do; with dire consequences if you ignore said warnings. One of the dire ones was about your watercooling....if you set your cooling temperature below the current dew point, dew will form which will mung up your laser, lower your property values and quite possibly lead to global thermonuclear war. My panic was in no way lessened by not being able to find any water cooling controls.
A heavy evening on the internet followed- I could have me a dew point digital thingy for $70, plus quite a lot of P&P or I could find a cheaper way. The equation for working out the dewpoint is a fiendish one -full of greek letters- and not something I fancied tackling on a regular basis. But I did find a chart (it's vaguely accurate, but doesn't account for barometric pressure....still close enough for government work and lets you know if you're in the danger zone). With the chart, all you need to know is the temperature and relative humidity, and you can work out the dew point in seconds. I made it a bit nicer-looking, working on the theory that I would have to look at it all day.
The temperature and humidity was easily sorted for under €14 delivered with a weather station from this chap (http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZi-navel).
After all this, of course, I found out that water cooling is only on 50W and above models; and that my 12W barbie laser just requires a small pc fan for cooling.
Anyway, some of you will have water cooling, and you may as well benefit from my unnecessary panic, so here you go.
You need: A device that measures temperature and relative humidity and this chart:
http://cambs.com/etch/dpc_small.jpg
There's also a full-fat larger version (http://cambs.com/etch/dpc.jpg) if you want something a little more poster-sized.
Hope somebody finds it useful.
A heavy evening on the internet followed- I could have me a dew point digital thingy for $70, plus quite a lot of P&P or I could find a cheaper way. The equation for working out the dewpoint is a fiendish one -full of greek letters- and not something I fancied tackling on a regular basis. But I did find a chart (it's vaguely accurate, but doesn't account for barometric pressure....still close enough for government work and lets you know if you're in the danger zone). With the chart, all you need to know is the temperature and relative humidity, and you can work out the dew point in seconds. I made it a bit nicer-looking, working on the theory that I would have to look at it all day.
The temperature and humidity was easily sorted for under €14 delivered with a weather station from this chap (http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQsassZi-navel).
After all this, of course, I found out that water cooling is only on 50W and above models; and that my 12W barbie laser just requires a small pc fan for cooling.
Anyway, some of you will have water cooling, and you may as well benefit from my unnecessary panic, so here you go.
You need: A device that measures temperature and relative humidity and this chart:
http://cambs.com/etch/dpc_small.jpg
There's also a full-fat larger version (http://cambs.com/etch/dpc.jpg) if you want something a little more poster-sized.
Hope somebody finds it useful.