It's already got a collimating lens, but I tweaked it to come to a point at a foot or so. It can be untweaked, and gives a nice parallel beam thats quite impressive in the dark. One problem is that at 650nm the human eye isn't all that sensitive, so the beam doesn't look as powerful as it really is. It hits peak brightness quite early on, and more power doesn't appear visibly brighter. The impressive bit is when you expand the beam out to about 6 inches across and it's STILL much brighter than an ordinary laser pointer

It makes a damn impressive red flashlight if you widen the beam enough! A spot six feet across on trees two hundred feet way is easily bright enough to make out all the details.

After this success, I bought another 10 surplus DVD writers at a radio rally yesterday for £15. Now I just need to figure out the best method of combining all the outputs into one beam

pca