How large for next flashlight buid?

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

I'm conflicted, help me out:

Should I stick to 4" lens diameter?

Or do I move up all the way to 6" diameter?

Price is no object, however 6" will be a fairly bulky tube and will make transportation more difficult.

On the other hand, 6" will make a smaller spot and give even higher intensity.

Here is what 4" looks like (my previous build, 1.5Mcd)

Just for reference, if you don't have a ruler around, 6" is just slightly bigger than the maxabeam head.

I don't know whether to go all out or if 4" is already large enough for a "flashlight" :/

2

I was going to say 4” but you’ve already done that so lets see what the six will do :wink:

3

Six-six-six-six!

4

Seems like 6 is pretty popular thus far.
On a side note, do people prefer gray or white?

5

6”. If it’s already that big why not? I’d like to see you keep that 1.5mcd but with a little chunkier emitter. Big guns down range…

6

Nah, this will be a throw only build, I have other projects for high lumen output with decent good range :stuck_out_tongue:

7

Six inch & gray …. :+1:

8

:+1:
Gonna be big…
I guess I can try make it stubbier, more can-like, like this cute lil telescope:

9

I made a model:

tbh with the wall thickness of the tube, the head is 190mm which is almost 8” and a bit too big…

At that point I may as well go all the way to 12”, switch to a parabolic reflector, and get like 4x more lux which would be the world’s farthest throwing LED searchlight for sure.
I guess I have to think longer on which one I want to spend my money on :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks for the input everyone.

10

Impressive throwers. Are you using dedomed XPG2 emitters?

Just to clarify, when you measured the 1.5Mcd, did you use the distance from the effective divergence point behind the light, like you have talked about before?

11

No, I will be using an oslon flat black.
Planning to buy 10 of them, and bin them myself.

I also didn’t measure the 1.5Mcd using the divergence method because that needs to be done at 100ft+ to get an accurate result.
http://nightsword.com/uniformbeamcalc/
Also, due to the crappy chinese lens, it’s hard to see where the hot spot actually ends, which is kinda necessary when you want to measure the spot size accurately :C

I still want to build another lens thrower and this time use a proper quality professional lens to see how nice of a spot I can get.
Knight optical quoted ~$250 for a 150mm aspheric, which isn’t too bad :slight_smile:

12

1.5Mcd from a 100mm lens means average luminance is 191 cd/mm^2, which is really high. Must be a pretty quality lens to get that (not to mention bright emitter).

13

Yeah it’s an old-gen XP-G2 S4 dedomed at 6A.
I still think (based on what i’ve seen from others) that the flat black will get even more.
The lens is pretty good for a chinese lens but the projection is no where near as sharp as the professional grade lenses I have.