The 3mm thick acrylic lens from flashlightlens.com is perfect, and is well secured with 6 screws around the front.
It looks like this in person too, almost invisible when it is on the flashlight.
BEAMSHOTS!
This time I swapped the LED out to a black flat, making it much easier to focus into a spot, although it is still not perfectly focused for max lux.
The distance to the trees is 400m.
No pics of this, but compared to the old OptoFire it has a noticeably brighter spot, while also being much larger.
The brightness of the beam is fairly similar, however the SyniosBeam has a much thicker beam due to the reflector diameter.
Would you say the hotspot on the trees is maybe about 8’ to 10’ in diameter? It looks very intense! But this is the Black Flat, right? So not able to compare to last nights shots. I don’t remember Lumens Specs for the both of them?
This is the black flat yes.
Black Flat: ~900lm, ~260cd/mm^2 (today)
Synios DMLN: ~200lm, ~310cd/mm^2 (last night)
Synios DMLQ: ~400lm, ~310cd/mm^2
CFT90: ~5000lm, ~200cd/mm^2 (30A)
Amazing work !
I can’t wait for the final measurement after the focus tuning :sunglasses:
Is there any spill ? Or does the recoil configuration make a pencil beam only ?
Yes it is beam only, like an aspheric thrower.
No chromatic aberration though, so spot is all evenly coloured.
Also the spot is a round shape due to the large difference in angles that the reflector picks up light at, no square die projection.
Those flashlightlens lenses are that clear I’ve had people putting fingerprints all over them as they dont believe it has a lens on it at all. :person_facepalming:
A lower voltage would reduce the heat, but also the flow rate.
Now that I added a heat path to the body it isn’t heating up
I might join the scratch build contest, however it took a year to plan and design this light, and there are still small things going wrong, so I doubt I would do a project this complex for a scratch build contest.
I bought a tiny tripod for it, so I can point it at different angles easily:
Well the biggest difference is it has no spill, also the corona is much less pronounced, so the transition from spot to darkness is a lot faster as you can see in the pic.
The spot is not perfectly round though, not sure if it is my focusing or just the reflector’s precision.
I will need to do further tests with the synios LEDs.
My first test from two days ago didn’t look like higher intensity than the OptoFire but it was definitely not well focused.
First I want to measure the black flat though.
Wooooaaaah! I missed this thread for weeks and was drawn in again by the mention of beamshots. This is fantastic work Enderman! A much cleaner build than the Optofire, and a bigger/further/better beam of course! Very very nice, I’m looking forward to more beamshots and numbers.
A lot more complicated too!
Same, I’m curious to see how far off my estimates are.
Haha thanks, very few people are interested in spending that much money on a thrower
Who knows, maybe in the future I can design a more affordable one that people would be willing to buy.
I mean, silent thunder ordnance sells mediocre 3D printed flashlights for hundreds of dollars when their parts only cost less than a hundred.
I agree Enderman stepped it up bigtime for this build. A little more detail on construction of the cooling system (bending the tubing, etc) would be great. It turned out really well.