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. 
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.
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.
Yes? And how is that relevant to the fact that heatpipes instead of solid copper was already suggested back in page two?
Bending heat pipes is difficult (wick must not be crimped, probably can’t bend multiple times due work hardening/embrittlement) and so is ensuring a tight fit to a heat sink. Fitting an U shaped pipe would require very precise bending while probably resulting in a larger head/more complicated heat sink design due to the required radius in the bend, an L piece would be slightly easier to mount but still tricky for the same reason and I guess centering of the mounted LED.
With an angled design there would be no radius to take into consideration and fit would basically be limited to lining up the contact surface of the HS to the rim of the reflector:
Imagine a cover over the heat pipe/heat sink contact area. My vector drawing skills aren’t too great 
Zebralight head lamp: https://eu.nkon.nl/magento17/media/catalog/product/cache/7/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/h/5/h52w_3.jpeg obviously much smaller light, it’s about the general idea.
This is interesting too:
No bending if used with a copper bezel, the heat pipe could be soldered/brazed to it, give the bezel a few fins and there is your cooling, also by using three pipes (merc symbol) it would not matter how it was orientated and give it the ability to hold the led at the focal point during rough use.
As far as using a large reflector the pipes would block less light % than using a smaller one 
Cheers David
I think it's not hard to bend heat pipes, I have seen people just wrap them around a solid metal cylinder to get nice 90 degree angles.
With flat heat pipes it's even easier than round, all you need to do is check the minimum bend radius (usually mentioned by the manufacturer) based on the width and thickness, and then bend it a bit bigger than that.
There is always the risk of kinking it if not bent correctly, but doing a 90 degree large radius bend should require minimal skill.
I really like the idea of using an aluminum/metal cylinder as the body and just binding the heatpipe to that using thermal adhesive, makes it a lot sleeker on the outside while still having good cooling :)
Whether a ‘bezel with a few fins’ would be sufficient depends on the power consumption of the LED. Remember that the heat pipe itself does not provide substantial cooling, it just transfers heat from A to B.
Soldering is possible afaik although you can see how easy that is by trying to solder something to bare copper and then multiplying by ~10. Brazing will probably cause the pipe to burst. Thermal epoxy is viable and common but you still need a tight fit between HP and HS, arctic silver epoxy has a thermal conductivity of about 8W/mK, even small (<1.5 mm thickness) heat pipes have conductivities in the range of 700W/mK and higher.
Another reason why a decent heat sink is important: If you’re using something like an MTG2 the LED itself can stomach junction temps well over 100C. The heatpipe can’t, because water is a gas at 100C (assuming the whole HP/HS circuit reaches 100C or close enough).
A page from the link I posted on page two, note they contain H2O.
Soldering is not only possible with a finished pipe but also gives optimal results
I should of said brazing can be done during manufacturing while it is still just a pipe not a heat-pipe.
Water boils at 100c at sea level pressure, contain it and the pressure rises as does the boiling point, think of a steam engine the fire produces enough heat to instantly melt lead yet the water is held just below boiling point, at the other extreme water will both boil and freeze at the same time in space 
Cheers David