Broken tube

[irfanulla]

Hi Folks - Just saw that my stored tube (60 watts) (which I had stored for 1 year) has broken right at the point of the wire (wire gets connected to a coil in the tube) entry near where the laser light is supposed to come oout - do you folks think it will work with a patch - I will try to post a picture soon.

[bdring]

That sounds bad. The special gas mix is on the other side and at a partial vacuum.

[macona]

Sorry, the tube is toast. Its now a glass sculpture.

I constantly worry about breaking mine like that.

[BenJackson]

I broke a water fitting off of mine and although I have a replacement on the way I'll probably try epoxying a 3D-printed "patch" on the old one.

Next tube I'm going to use 5/16" surgical tubing (dead soft) instead of the 1/4" Tygon for the body-to-lens "jumper" tube. I'll cinch them with zip ties. The fittings on the lens ends are pretty stout but the body is pretty thin. Mine snapped off when I angled the stub of tubing to attach the other end.

[trwalters001]

I used surgical tubing on mine.
So far, so good...

[bdring]

I used surgical tubing on my first laser. It worked fine, but was very prone to kinking. I always checked to before running because many times kinks found would have caused problems. It is also degrades quickly over time and get brittle. Some of the gases from cutting might accelerate that problem.

[BenJackson]

I'm only going to use the surgical tubing to jumper the endcaps to the tube body. I'll use tygon to run to the pump. The fittings on the laser endcaps are much stouter than the ones on the body.

[BenJackson]

Surgical tubing IS annoyingly kinky for those short hops too. I experimented some more with tygon figuring I had nothing to lose. I discovered that with some flaring (with needle nose pliers, for example) and copious dish soap you could get some really low force for applying the tube. We'll see how brave I am when the new tube arrives.

I did manage to patch the hole and fire the laser, so at least I know the PSU works. There's a pinhole in my patch I need to find and slather with epoxy. Is this how you end up building two laser cutters?

[irfanulla]

Hi All - thanks for those replies - my supplier of laser tubes in HK does not want to supply me tubes - the landing cost of a tube in india from HK is 25K indian and that of locally available is 38K - I am perplexed on how to get a tube and from where in a safe condition- I get my tubes in plastic PVC tubes and almost all the time they break somewhere - its 3 numbers now!

do you folks have any hints on how to pack a tube - moreover the size of packing makes it so expensive to ship - the last time DHL cost me 260USD from HK to India!

Regards
IRfan

[BenJackson]

You can see a picture of mine still packaged: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=557#p3905

That was the laser tube wrapped in bubble wrap until it fit inside a 4" PVC pipe. The ends of the pipe had about 3" of hard inside. Then that was wrapped in bubble wrap until it was maybe 9 or 10" around. Then the ends were capped with more hard foam and then the entire thing was wrapped in a 1" thick soft foam. It was all secured by being wound with tape (the entire outside package you can see is tape).

The bubble wrap itself was fairly poor quality (someone else mentioned that it wasn't very bubbly).