BLF recoil über-thrower

There are 4.5W diodes availiable
Its probably driven by multiple 2W laser diodes

Wow! 4000lm from 14 Watts power is better then any LED ?!
(edit) Ah, that’s 14 Watts laser light output power…

I needed to repair friends Ultrafire UF-007 recently(burned emitter swap) and I can say that even swapping old burned XRE EZ1000 to new XRE (old and unused) was a pain. And as you know XRE has nice bottom ± contacts so It can be handled easier than most emitters. Modding with XP-G2 or similar will require more thinking and tinkering (so to reflow to miniature pcb and epoxy it or reflow same configuration to minature brass shim or even direct reflow of bare emitter to miniature brass shim)

My opinion about estimated performance even before you finish it in comparison with 50mm aspheric:

UF-007 is 25kcd light if you manage to get 1.8A to stock XRE.
Good 50 mm aspheric with same XRE emitter will roughly have 70kcd at same drive current.

Modding: Swapp old XRE with de domed XP G2 de domed and better components in 50 mm aspheric and you are roughly at 220kcd which is around 200% kcd performance increase over old XRE so it is right to estimate that with same modding of UF-007 light you’ll also get 200% increase and that means that even modded UF-007 will not pass 100 kcd.
More likely around 80kcd.

It will be nice experiment… Good luck :+1:

Yeah, it’s soldered to the tiny copper core of the centre piece of the boom. I used a tiny butane torch to heat it up and pulled the XR-E off by the wires.

Does it need a shim for the correct focal distance?

I took my UF-008 (same set up as 007) apart, removed the XR-E and will (try to) give it a new slim copper boom and planning to use a de-domed XP-E2, run it on 5x 7135 if possible (heat dissipation).
I expect it to be comparable with a 35mm aspheric lens.
It will have a tighter beam than one with an XP-G2.

For the 6” recoil light i’ll use a XP-L HI initially.
I’m thinking about a way to make it zoomable by moving the LED towards the reflector, but this will obviously complicate things…

Dang, i just measured the UF 007 (or 008) and it approximately reflects about 90° of the light, which is more than i expected.
With the mirascope reflector the light will only reflect an additional 30° (120°) which is only 33% more… :frowning:
That’s not so über i.m.o…

Maybe use a tiny primary lens…

Using extra optics will not increase the throw, even decrease it a bit. It may increase the output and hotspot size.

Yeah, i know, but since it’s such a big reflector, maybe a good compromise can be achieved with a little bit of pre-collimation…

I would think so. If I ever try this, I want to use liquid cooling to help get heat out of that pillar.

Does it need a shim for the correct focal distance?

Well I think that maybe it is not necessary… How? Once you put those tiny copper bolt out and re-flow emitter directly to it
(this will be tricky and pain since you’ll need to trim those tiny bolt before pre-tining and soldering directly to bare led).

If properly done you can manually adjust height to desired level (probably around 0,7mm higher from copper bolt base) and mark an outline on that copper(brass) piece when you find correct distance.

After that put it back in a empty bolt hole glued with thermal glue like artic alumina.

About long tiny wires… Anything larger than 24 awg will be to much and you could braid it and epoxy once when done.

Choice of XP-E2? Well I am not sure… That will be to tiny but good thing is maximum performance at very low current draw. I think it reaches full performance around 2.2 but Djozz knows that better.

I’m considering it too actually.
Just hope 2 heat pipes will be enough, otherwise you need a waterpump too…
We’ll see. :slight_smile:

Haha yeah, lasers that powerful are like $500 USD, even I can't afford that just for a potential experiment.

Maybe if I can find someone at my university with one...

Yes but the reflector is very small, which means the LED is a short distance from the reflector.

The closer the LED is to the reflector, the more beam divergence you will get due to the LED size.

If you made that reflector twice the size, the focal length would double, the LED would be twice as far away from the lens, and the beam divergence would be reduced even more.

This would be a similar effect as using an LED that is half as large (die area)

So yeah, the mirascope reflector should still be a huge improvement. :)

If you’re going to use heat pipes I’d suggest using a perpendicular head (think zebralight) for ease of manufacture. The laser design seems very effective but kinda dumb. Who wants to put on protective glasses every time he wants to use a flashlight? High power lasers can cause permanent severe damage to eyesight in a fraction of a second. To me that’s a big “Fuck No” as far as using them when not absolutely necessary goes.

The laser idea was just a concept for future stuff I might do, OP isn't actually going to do that for this light.

The point of laser+phosphor crystal is to get something similar to a HID searchlight but without needing several-kilovolt power supplies and thousands of watts of power.

HID lamps are also dangerous because they emit UV, can explode, contain toxic gases, require thousands of volts to run, etc... but people still use them because it is the only way of getting light powerful enough to reach many kilometres.

There will always be some risk when dealing with lights like this, which people are willing to take to make the brightest light possible, or in this case use a new technology such as laser+crystal.

This is not meant to be a typical flashlight that you just use to light up a path or anything like that. It isn't even called a flashlight at this point.

I need a 6 inch alu tube section, maybe a 19” alu strip bent around in a circle.
On it i will have to somehow fix the heat pipes which will be the boom that holds the LED.
Is that what you meant?

I thought it was a very nice idea actually, but unaffordable and as you say:

It’s not gonna be a laser exited phosphor. :slight_smile:

Of course, but my initial goal was to reflect as much light as possible and out throwing everything else with the same ‘light engine’ and hotspot size.
Now i’m not so sure if this will be better than a multi lens set up (with which i have gotten some impressive (at least to me) results)…
We’ll see.
Soon the mirascope will arrive, then i can get an idea.

Recoil is definitely the best way to get almost all the light, I have a flashlight using a 100mm aspheric which has awesome throw and 1M lux, but there is over 50% light wasted even with a Wavien collar, so it's about 500lm or less actually coming out the front.

I'm not a fan of multi-lens setups due to the inefficiency at each lens, and imperfections/error gets multiplied every time making the collimation worse. 1 or 2 lenses is the optimal configuration. or a single reflector.

Currently I'm doing some tests with an aspheric+spherical lens, I got about 1 960 000 lux on the last test (no collar) which is pretty impressive, although the thing is as big as a garbage can and weighs like 5kg xD

I'm looking forward to seeing your reflector results, if you can get at least 500k lux I will also buy one :D

If heat is a concern, what if the arm was (at least in part) a heatpipe as opposed to solid metal?

It could be drilled. I’m talking about pumped fluid, not a liquid salt. Other options are good, I’m thinking aloud about how to use these fancy mills.

Guys, he already bought a heat pipe to do the initial testing, he knows its better than solid copper :P I think it was discussed on page 2 or 3 or something.

More than one of us can make things.