IamKosta.org

Ebay is a literal treasure trove for so many amazing things. I found these sweet surplus lasers which happened to be sold by a laser refurbisher a few short miles from my school. 300 bucks got me two working CO2 lasers. One was to be for parts, the other to use.

Unfortunately these lasers are BEASTS tipping the scales at several hundreds of pounds. Why you ask? Because they have a giant primary transformer inside of them that looks like it belongs on a power pole. It's job is to provide the thousands of volts to ionize the gasses inside the laser tube. Because of this it took a forklift to get them into the bed of my friends truck for transport.

...and because we didn't have a forklift near my dorm room it took a bit of careful engineering to get them out...

The laser tube is the constant gas kind-- meaning you need to have a flow of CO2 (provided by an external tank) in order to make the laser work. The primary optics are water cooled-- when you turn the thing on it sounds like a fountain.