Some help purchasing laser goggles

And if that’s the case, anyone wearing normal glasses should be ok.

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Yeah. The glowforge and other lasers only have a glass/acrylic lid on them. One would think that this is sign enough that these materials are substantial enough to prevent any damage.

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I suspect acrylic and glass will melt / crack when hit by the unfocused 40W beam for any length of time.

Goggles are rated with optical densities that are many orders of magnitude but a high power laser would destroy them pretty quickly, so to measure the attenuation they must need a very sensitive detector, and a low power laser or a very fast detector and a short pulse.

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probably, but I highly doubt anyone will be holding their head in the path of the beam for any length of time. a reflective flash shouldnt be of concern to anyone unless they wear those super thin glasses haha

either way, I have a few pairs of laser goggles here just in case im workin with the old chinese laser

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If you’re worried about extremely bright flare, despite the existing shielded cover on the Glowforge, you can always pick up some welder’s glass off Amazon for fairly cheap and keep it near the forge.

You can get either just a square sheet, or heck… get some circular lenses and cut yourself some frames on the forge! :smiley:

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We’re doing a great deal of work on safety profiling the Pro that may include some advice around glasses to make compliance easier for you. If you haven’t purchased glasses already, I would hold off until you read the Pro manual (which will be available when we start shipping production units of the Pro). (Sorry to be a bit vague here - I can’t give safety advice until it’s 100% locked in).

If you already have CO2 laser rated glasses, though, those should work fine.

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That’s great to hear, Dan. I actually already do have some rated goggles, so I jumped the gun in that respect.

I was more thinking of the comments people had with lasing items (rock? I think?), which would light up a very bright hotspot that could not be comfortably viewed… to make it easier to shield from bright lights with case closed, not specifically CO2 wavelength.

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Compact discs are transparent. They’re great for, ohhh… looking through at the sun to view an eclipse… :smiley:

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What’s a CD? :stuck_out_tongue:

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Hard copy version of MP3 file. :innocent:

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Is there a way to test fire the laser of a Glowforge? E.g. a mode where pressing the button energises it like I have seen people do with the Chinese machines. I am guessing not.

Please, please, please never do this!

CD’s are not safe to use for solar viewing. Here’s NASA’s Eclipse Safety page.

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Not really

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Well the good news is the 5K iMac screen appears to be coffee proof… Wiped right off… :grin:

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Thanks Dan.

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It may only be a US thing, but back when AOL was spamming the world with round disks you could deposit your money for a fixed length of time and earn interest on it. CD was short for certificate of deposit. It’s possible at some point in the future interest rates will rise high enough to make them popular again.

Presumably you have to punch a pinhole through your paper CD and shine it against a blank index card (another prehistoric artifact) like we did in elementary school to see the eclipse.

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Maybe if you ripped “Dark Side of the Moon”?

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You don’t want to be to casual on laser safety. GF staff are making the system as safe as possible, but…

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I guess my question is, why would you want to? As I understand it the only reason to do it with the Chinese lasers is for some sort of calibration, right?

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Yes, which we might need to do when replacing tubes ourselves. Or for diagnosing faults like @Xabbess had. Or for experimenting as @takitus proposed above.

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