Last night I went over to the shop and dug through the manuals and schematics. Found some more info on what it was originally being used for, the final hermetic seal on the Tek 2467 and Tek 7707 tubes. The 2467 I can find info on, the 7707 I can't, I will head down to the Tek museum locally to see if anyone knows about this guy. The tubes used a microchannel plate to amplify the electron beam in tube to get a brighter image at very fast scan times.
I pulled the cover off the resonator to take a look. Someone in the past had taken out the intracavity telescope used in drilling and cutting as well as a beam path sealing tube. Both of these are in the drawer so they just need to be cleaned up. That will have to wait until next week, I am waiting to get some Chromatographic grade methanol to clean the optics. I pulled off the beam guards between the mirrors and the yag rod and took a peak down there. It looks pretty good, the rod is clear.
Today I hooked up some high voltage to the cap banks. The cap banks consist of 24 1000uf, 450v caps. They get charged to 425v max and the energy is dumped into the flash lamps with a giant transistor. I have a small DC/DC front end converter that gives me 380v out from 85 to 120v in. I slowly charged the banks and they seem to be happy to at least 380v.
More pics:
Down the rod:
Components from left to right, beam expanding telescope (collimator), shutter and water cooled beam dump, energy monitor section, output couple mount, optical cavity, total reflector mount. After that is where the intracavity telescope mounts and the beam path cover. In this picture the laser is set up for welding, it has a very short cavity with flat mirrors on both ends. You get a powerful fat beam that is multimode, not great beam quality. This is fine for welding. For things where you need to get down much smaller they add the intracavity telescope, replace the front mirror with an etalon and the high reflector is replaced with a water cooled aperture and moved back and another mirror with a 10m curvature is installed at the far end of the rail. This gives a lower powered, high quality beam that can be focused much tighter.