[buddydog]

Fine business Charlie. First I am envious of your machine being the bigger 50 watt! Also I reread my post from yesterday and I might have given the impression that seeing the discharge in the tube meant it was bad and that is not true. I just meant if the discharge inside the tube was there it meant you have high voltage. With either bad control (software board or test switch), dead tube, or no high voltage, you would have the situation you see in yours.

Now as to the "Lucius Gale peanut test": Nothing is removed, changed, exposed etc. Just dangle the peanut "near" the red lead (remember the peanut is tied on the end of a long dry cotton thread so no body parts are anywhere near the high voltage and you are standing on an inverted plastic bucket with nothing near a ground and a helper is pressing the test button) while pressing the test switch and it should jump right over and stick to it. This is anywhere along the red lead from where it comes out of the power supply to where it attaches to the tube. High school (the old high school where you actually learned something) physics class. If it doesn't do that you have two likely possibility's with the first being something wrong with the wire (grounded, broken, connections all pretty unlikely as high voltage jumps through just about anything) OR, the likely cause of "no high voltage with the red test light lit" Ta da: bad power supply. Relatively cheap on ebay. I would encourage fixing the supply but since there is no schematics, parts etc. and they are cheap just replace it after the simple tests I described. My posts are only to help make an informed decision instead of a "dart board" one. Your new tube could fix the problem but you didn't have enough info to make that decision and it may have cost time and money and frustration leading to " crap Chinese machine" comments you read so often on these forums.

I want to add another thing to this post. It's something I haven't tried so I don't know for sure what the proper indication would be but I suspect there should be "no" attraction of the peanut to the ground black wire (attached to the output end of the tube on my machine). If I remember right that black wire goes to that big green resister and if it "opened" (fried for the layman) then the voltage should go "high" on the ground lead and it would attract the peanut which "should" indicate a bad ground connection. I think that resistor is a meter shunt to measure current but I'm not positive. All of this paragraph is suspect as I have not actually tried this and depending on the value of that resister some high voltage could be backed up behind it causing the black lead to attract the peanut even in a working machine. Anyway I could check that on a running machine if you get this far.

Lastly in your original post you said something about "adding a meter". I would strongly recommend you don't. Just make sure everything is factory and don't mess around with the high voltage end of things. If you want to do anything buy one of the "high voltage" meters like I described in my first post and get a bench mark reading on your machine when you get it working and you will have an accurate test system to use the next time this happens. Please please let us know how this turns out and also I am happy to help more as you go along.

I took some pictures to go along with this post. I first tried putting the paper in front of the end of the tube and as expected, nothing happened. Next I tried pressing fire and looking in the tube, but I saw no light, no sound, nothing. I took a flashlight and inspected the tube and noticed what looks like sediment in the inner cylinder of the tube, just in the one area shown in the pics. I tried to get a decent picture of it. I also took some photos of the guts of my machine. I'm wondering which box is actually the power supply, and what is the other box?

Also you'll notice my contacts(?) On my laser tube have tubing over them. I put the tubing over them and filled with silicone to prevent arcing. I did this about 10 months ago when I first got the machine. I don't know if I can do the peanut test with the terminal (?) Covered the way it is? In one of the photos I took a closeup shot of part of the circuit board. There is an led with an 'L' marked by it. When I press the test fire button, this led comes on. I don't know if I mentioned this before but now whenever I press the fire button or activate the laser, since it's not working, I hear no sound. When the laser was working good, you could always tell when the laser fired, because you could hear the sizzle or crackle of the laser.

So, I know I need to do the peanut test next, but don't know if I can with that silicone on there. Also could that sediment have made my tube go out? Any more advice you can give, I'm all wars. I really appreciate your help.

Charlie