What is the impact of a reflector which is not 100% spotless?
To tweak the beam of my C8 i have sanded down the gasket until it was paper-thin, which improved the beam but it was still not a laser beam, it diverges.
So i filed down the reflector quite a bit, i dont have the guts to go any further at the moment.
Filing and sanding caused a dirty reflector. I have messed up 1 reflector earlier and now i know it is a p.i.t.a. to get it clean.
Got it quite clean with soap, running water and a hairdryer but it still shows minor stains due to dried water, which annoys me, do i have to, other then cosmetics?
The influence of some dust specs can not even be measured, but stains really do influence the throw somewhat, but nothing that can be seen by eye.
About beam divergence: a led in a reflector can not be seen as a point source, led dies have a certain size, the hotspot of the beam is in fact a (twisted) image of the led die. With the led as source, the reflector as optic, and the hotspot as image, the normal lens formula sort of applies in which the distance from optic-to-hotspot divided by the distance from led-to-optic determines the magnification of the led die, the size of the hotspot.
In short: because a led is not a point source, the beam in even a perfect reflector will always diverge.
I’ve had pretty good luck before rinsing a reflector with distilled water and using a can a air to help blow out the particles, then rinse with isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol and blow it out again with the air. Using distilled water and the alcohol didn’t leave water mineral marks.
One possible reason: lower voltage (all LEDs parallel) means higher current for same output which results in more resistance losses in cables, contacts, PCB traces et al.
I’m going on a long bicycle tour and would like to take 2 18650 lights (Lumintop Prince and Nitecore HC30).
Is there a small portable charging device that I could use on my trip that I could charge and carry with me to charge up my batteries along the way?
Yes, there are several options for that. But there is one portable device clearly the most efficient, cheap and compact, it is called ‘spare batteries’
Thanks for all tips guys, managed to get it quite clean.
I have filed down the reflector even more and now the bottom is really thin, just as the gasket, i think this is all i can get out of it, very happy.
To clean it i have rinsed it using running tap water and blew it out using my new dust blower which recently arrived. After that i used 70% rubbing alcohol which i still had lying around (kids…) and used cotton wool which worked great.
Blew it out once again and it ended up really well!