How to Make a Laser Flashlight - Laser Flashlight Hack!

Hi everyone,

This was something I decided to experiment with. I had not ever made anything with lasers before so I figured it was time to give it a shot.
Please let me know what you think. Was this an entertaining vid for you? Would you like to see more projects like this? Would you rather have the 4 minutes of your life back? LOL!

Pack of laser pointers I used (2)

Looks pretty cool, always interesting to see what other members get up too.
Just curious though and not meaning to put a dampener on it, but how safe is it, I mean for the eyes, especially in the shots where your shining it around inside, is not the reflected laser light bad for the eyes ?
I’ve always fancied experimenting with lasers but some of the stories of the dangers rather put me off as I value my sight, so have always aired on the side of caution, or is it really fairly safe ?

It is a good idea to have some safety glasses around. These are pretty low power, but I got a pair anyway. Just make sure you get the ones that are rated for your lasers wavelength ( IE 532nn) and NOT just the color of laser.

Here are the ones I got.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009T6RN0G/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Awesome project! I really like how it looks after you removed the lenses. I would love to see one made from purple lasers.

What I’d love to see (and buy):

Even amounts of Red, Green and Blue lasers
All focused to one spot

A white laser, or would it be a super thower flashlight? :smiling_imp:

Your tax dollars at work: Berkeley Lab EH&S – Environment, Health & Safety

and

Careful, careful, careful!!

I can’t find any rating on the above goggles (OD, optical density), and even if one were listed, I wouldn’t trust my eyeballs to a pair of <10bux goggles.

Take the laser, shine it on the wall from a few feet away. Now put the goggles in front of the laser. If you see, well, anything, on the wall, they’re not good. At best they’d slightly limit damage to your eyeballs, but at worse, they’re a false sense of security and you can do some serious damage before you even know it.

Even a paltry OD3 (meh) would reduce the laser’s intensity by 1000, and an OD5 (decent) would reduce it to 1/100,000th its intensity. So if you can still see the laser shining on the wall, like, at all, they’re just tinted plastic.

I play around with 1W violet lasers and occasionally some more powerful ones. Even a glancing reflection from a screw-head across the room for the smallest fraction of a second could burn your retina and leave you with a permanent blind-spot (or -streak) for the rest of your life.

That said, tres kewl! :smiley:

I know alllllll about alignment issues. I wanted to make a Predator-style parrot-gun from 3 red lasers, and nah, you’d need to really tweak the lasers’ aim and then pot them in epoxy to keep any jostling from throwing them out of alignment.

Cool but I pity any animals/humans that you inadvertently hit in the eye with that. :frowning:

He posted that from the House Of Blind Spiders?

Cool. Run a black wooden or metal dowel down the middle a few feet with a cap at the end and you’d have a light saber.

The real question is, why not use one 1-5W laser with removed lens?

I have thought about this for some time. When I needed a 20km thrower. You can use 1W lasers in few colors to get something that resembles white light. RGB for example? And only 3 are needed.

You can’t see the infrared.
It’s supposed to go through a frequency-doubling crystal which emits the energy as green light
These things leak, and the innards will get misaligned if not securely put together.
A filter is supposed to be in the tube to block any infrared leakage.
Infrared filters are expensive, compared to a bit of cheap plastic or nothing.
Do you feel lucky?

I like laser flashlight idea very much…

Hope you’ll continue developing it.

Cool thanks for the reply, I’ll get a pair of them :slight_smile:

Interesting stuff, i would like to see more like this.

I put one of those green lasers in a tank TK 007-703 host powered by a 10180 cell

Definetly easier to get in a pocket :slight_smile: I love the tank flashlights, they are good hosts, or even unmodded lights.