[PART 1] Official BLF GT Group Buy thread. Group buy officially closed! Lights shipping.

OK
Jerommel is your design fit for 2 times a 4 18650 carrier?
I am going to pm Jerommel and in the mean time let’s wait for input from 5ar here (I am sure that if he does what TA and me have asked him we see a design dtgst is an awesome mix of his, Thijsco and Jeronmels input and all is well :wink:
Also tonight here it ia working hours in the US so I will call the software company and the IM people around 24h in about 11 hours and report back on that too.

Yes, i can make the tube wider for carriers, if carriers is what you truly want.
The tube will have to be 52mm wide in stead of 48 (which will look better with that huge head)
I will make the head fit the ‘4wheeler reflector’, which by the way is considerably deeper than what i went by earlier, so it will be a bit of a challenge.
I’ll probably need a day or two to come up with the results.
PS: PM received.

OK after some thinking: I start a poll Saturday during the day (local time here) and give all the designs people want to have as option (this can be own design, or s post pointing to a design from somebody else.)

Please take machining into account while designing :wink:

This is actually very important with a design like this and honestly something that most of us do not have a clue about.

For example during the initial render design 5AR kept changing my requests in order to “make them machinable”. I didn’t have a clue at the time about such things but after some research he was right.

Which is another reason his design looks that way it does, he has made sure to adjust the design to make it is as easy as possible to machine and thus reduce the cost drastically for the final part.

An important question is if it should fit the 4wheeler reflector.

And i think most of us know how a flashlight is built, because we love to take them apart and it’s not rocket science.

A BLFer contacted me and he is in contact with a Chinese company able to make any size reflector without minimum order quantity
He wants to order a sample of what would be a GT reflector and pm me with results to post (I think he got a little scared of by the little over the top discussion the last pages so for bow he does prefer me communicate about it.)

In others words, if a BLFer can do it so a manufacturer

Meaning we could just set the size and shape of a reflector and have some results of it pretty fast and can adjust design based on what we come up with as reflector, this is great news and requires me to edit topic title and OP but I cannot do that till much later today so hopefully you guys pick up on this post :wink:

That’s awesome. :slight_smile:

…and, can they do a reflector for a recoil too maybe…??

Which is why we worry about the manufacture first, reflector after.

It would be SUPER cool if someone could get their hands on a ~120mm ID and ~100mm deep reflector to run some tests with. It would give us a boatload of info with which to go forward with!

I would love to hear the details on this….

How they look and how they are made are different. Some designs are much more expensive to make for what appears to us to be minor changes.

I have experienced this before in other production processes but it was never my department so I never really looked into it.

Seeing the TN42 has excellent throw I’d say a scale up one of those
Who will cut his in half for measurement? :smiley:

Ha! I’ve been thinking that from the first time I read this thread. Who is going to (very carfully) cut their TN42 reflector right down the middle and give us a cross section to work with as the starting point for the GT relector? I’m not saying steal anything but the best way to make the next best is to study the current best right? Unless of course Thrunite is willing to hand over their CAD model in the name of science. :smiley:

Edit: This same line of thinking is why I thought it was crazy to entertain any emitter but some variant of XHP35. All the current throw kings use it. There is a reason for that…

Couldn’t we get a close approximation with a profile gauge? At least of the outside.

Another alternative would be to line the inside with saran wrap and make a plaster (or some more exotic material) casting of the inside.

It’s easy for me to say this, since I don’t have an expensive reflector to try it out on that I could ruin, so I got no skin in the game.

If this is going to be done, I hope you will think long and hard about how it will be done. Because as far as I am concerned a poll like this has the potential to turn into a gigantic cluster.

  • For instance, 5ar has five different designs (I think it is). Most or many of them with small changes & tweaks he was asked to make. Many are completely happy with 5ar’s designs.
  • Jeromell has at least one design he is finalizing, and he may be working on more. (I don’t know) Many are completely happy with Jeromell’s designs.
  • thijsco19 has designs, not sure how many. Many are completely happy with thijsco19’s designs.
  • MortyDuck came up with a V0.45 based off 5ar’s V0.4 & V0.5. Many are completely happy with it. But basically it is another 5ar design.
  • There may be others I have missed, my apologies if there are.

I think if there is to be a poll, the first poll does not need to be what design, but what “designer”.

Let each designer submit as many or as few examples of his work and then vote on the designer…. NOT the design.

After that is settled once and for all… (hopefully)…… then vote on the design if need be.

That, as far as I am concerned; is the only way this will not turn into a circus.

:slight_smile:

EDIT: Hopefully somehow this “poll/vote” will be limited to people who are actually on the “interest list”.

Or put a plastic bag over the reflector and fill the reflector with clay. Pull out the bag with clay and you have a nice negative. Cut it in half and redraw it on paper.

The issue here is time, that would delay things a few weeks at least and we were planning on proposing the idea to a manufacture soon.

I do agree that a poll such as this has all sorts of potential issues though.

I totally understand the time issue & completely agree with you.
I have my personal opinions about there even being a need for this poll… but that is not my call so I’ll keep them to myself. :wink:

But I’ll stand by this……… the “DESIGNER” needs to be nailed down first and foremost.
Also, I personally think that person needs to be capable of professional quality renders.

That is my .05…… :slight_smile:

Asking may be pushing it though that’s just an outsider guess. Haven’t recoil throwers always had problems with heat dissipation that’s held them from the top spots? I recall hearing that argument a few times and all the recoil designs I see are under-driven for that reason as far as I know. Maybe the XHP35 falls into a possible exception since it will be under 3A? Seems doubtful though. That said I’d be interested to hear more. The conversation here has gotten beyond my level of knowledge. This thread has sparked a lot of excellent discussion and debate on design theory. Some people have even gotten worked up a bit here and there. :wink:

That’s a lot of work to end up drawing a parabola, isn’t it?
I mean, it’s a parabola…

I thought it was a reflector manufacturer, so they manufacture reflectors, apparently any size you wish and small numbers too.

But now we have heat pipes.

I think it’ll work just fine.
Here’s a topic on it:

The problem is finding a good reflector, but this gave me hope.
Maybe for a DIY kit?

I appreciate that you see me as one of the designers :smiley: . I don’st see me really as a designer at this point.
What I mean is that everything I’ve made is based on either 5ar his design’s or jerommel his design’s. Yes I did put some of my thought in it but still I didn’t make an entire light from scratch as jerommel did.

However, I might still do that! In fact, I will start right now. :smiley: