I’m not bothered by the taper; I just don’t like this sort of finish. In an ideal world, it’d be the same sort of finish as the blf 348; of course this is a different thing.
I find bare aluminum transmits heat to my hand much faster than anodized aluminum. The result is hot-rodded high-lumen lights are much less practical. I have to ramp down earlier to avoid burning my hand.
Like I said earlier, I am good with whatever it turns out to be.
A preference is clear anodized…. but certainly not a deal breaker in any way if it is not. It would not even bother me if it had a lightly blasted finish.
Well in that case, why not reduce the threshold temperature and let it do that for you? Generally conductivity is thought to be a good thing; isn’t it?
I saw some bare aluminum recently that looked pretty nice.
They call it raw, tumbled aluminum.
Dont want to link to picture so I’ll just put a link if anyone wants to see it.
They all look great to me. Just ordered a D4, can’t wait any longer to burn a flashlight profile into my hands, but I am keen to have both now to compare, and it looks like a holster made for one will fit the other so edc rotation works
Once heat gets to the outside of the light emissivity is a good thing. Conductivity, not so much. The interior of the light and the battery can all take much more heat than my hand can. All removing the anodizing on a light like this does is make it so I can’t run it in turbo as long. There’s really no upside.
This light doesn’t have a lot of thermal mass or a lot of surface area. If you want something which runs at 3000+ lumens for more than a few seconds without getting hot, this isn’t the light you’re looking for. It’s simply not big enough… so its turbo level is really a “burst only” mode, much like the D4-219c.
The default settings place the ceiling at the 8x7135 level though, which it can sustain quite a bit longer than full turbo. Last time I tested that, it looked like this:
“Surface Treatment of Aluminum, Wernick and Pinner, 4th Edition, P.608, Ch. 9. Hard Anodizing:
The thermal conductivity of the anodic coating is between one tenth and one thirtieth of that of aluminum:
The emissivity of aluminium increases rapidly as the thickness of the layer is built up, increasing to 80% for a 10 um coating. A thick hard anodic coating is therefore well on the way to being a ‘black-body’ for heat dissipation, and there is very little advantage in dyeing it black as is sometimes done.”