This Nitrogen Laser was to provided to me by a friend. I have very little detail about the laser
or it's design so it will take some reverse engineering to discover how it was meant to work. I haven't
even diagrammed the attached circuitry yet. Most of the capacitors are rate for 20Kv, there is also on
large high voltage resistor as well. Firing is apparently done via a thyratron which you can see in the
pictures. The very last picture has specifications for this HY-1102thyratron. I still have some nitrogen gas
available in my tank so I am going to try to fire this laser up during the summer. I know I know,
I said the same thing about the 3 watt argon tube. I will get to that as well unless someone will make
an offer on it ;)
The nitrogen laser is built on an aluminum baseplate. The electrodes of the laser are rounded where the faces
meet each other. This excited me as I do not have the facilities to fabricate this style of electrode myself, and
my previous N2 laser used straight edge electrodes which I was not particularly happy with.
I suspect that due to the thyratron this laser will be much quieter to run than my homebuilt laser with the pressurized
and enclosed spark gap.
I need to dig up a high voltage power supply for this. Fortunately my friend also provided me with the filament/heater
transformer that is needed for the thyratron to operate properly. Nothing is more interfering than hunting down
special use transformers!
