I don't see how it could, as the die is still in the same location, only brighter.
With a LED on a pedestal or something small enough that you can drop the reflector down around it, power the LED at a low enough level so you can look at it, then move the upside-down reflector over it. You can see the light reflected back down and get an idea of the height where it will focus best back onto the die.
Plastic Mag reflectors are cheap enough you can use the first one as a test mule, cut it in small increments until the focus gets better, better, better, then worse... note that dimension just before it started to get worse, then cut the reflector you're actually going to use to that height.
I cut them with a small Dremel cutoff wheel in the drill press and slide the reflector around face-down to make the cut, it's the least destructive way I've found and it gives a perfectly flat and square cut line that only needs the burrs scraped off afterwards. Like this...
That's not a plastic reflector, but you get the idea. Use a low enough speed that the plastic doesn't melt. :)
Interesting stuff, I always figured the real waiven collar uses some king of a retroreflective coating to maximize effeciency. Is that the case or is it all in the ideal collar profile, ie a spherical reflector.
Using an inverted incan reflector is a neat idea though I’ll have to give that a go, I’m sure it makes quite a bit of an improvement once the focus is dialed in. Thanks for the tip
And what about a tiny chrome plated hemi-sphere with a hole in the top sitting right on the emitter? A waiven dome for a dedome emitter if you will
I’ve used old tiny Christmas bulbs a few time on dedomed xmls and as far as I’m concerned you get a nice little increase if you did a good job dedoming and didn’t take off any phosphor
I cut them off at the top where trees already a hole and just clean it up
I’ve also tried using reflectors my experience with those are that there very thick so you can’t make as clean of a cut due to melting the plastic
But the use of a drill press does sound like a winning ticket
I wish I had one
In this first pic the Mag reflector is centered, the reflected light is going back down onto the die...
Moved off center, you can see both the reflected spot (off the lower right corner) and also that the die is no longer washed out, you can see detail there that wasn't visible with the reflector centered. Both pics were with camera in manual mode, same settings for both, so the differences between the pics are real and not caused by the camera auto-adjusting.
This doesn't affect the lens or focal length, it just recycles some of the wasted spill and uses it to make the die brighter. Aspherics are really projectors, so if the die is brighter the projected image will be brighter as well.
Hey Comfychair, thanks for the Wavien hack. It’s a bit of an old forum post, I was wondering if you’re still on it.
I’m trying it out right now, ordered the same Maglite reflectors and using a cree xml2 LED. I see a slight difference in brightness. However, I have the Wavien assembled prototype version next to it and that seems still brighter.
The Wavien is more of a yellow LED and mine is blue-ish, so bit hard to tell, optically.
And there seem more slight differences, the Wavien version is more parabolic for example, I can imagine this gives a better result?
I was wondering if you ever tested the results with exactly the same LED’s with a Wavien collar compared with your setup?
I wish I could do, but the wavien collar is glued to its base, cannot easily take it off.
Also wondering if you got any further results in general?
If your beam is still blueish it means that the recycling is not occurring, or is not happening very effectively. When the light is recycled back onto the phosphor correctly, the remaining blue wavelengths are re-emitted in warmer wavelengths. thus the warmer light you see on the original Wavien prototype, even though its emitter is ~6500K (quite blue before the recycling process).
The Wavien reflector is not parabolic, but rather perfectly spherical, and so the wasted light is retro-reflected directly back to the emitter.
The asphere lens and its NA also affects the ultimate Candela output and throw, and the Wavien and Marinebeam RLT lights use a custom and expensive lens.
This is great info. Thanks Jeff! Interesting.
I’m using the prototype without lens btw.
And it’s true that with this maclite reflector positioned right it becomes just slightly more yellow, but just not enough.
Wavien stopped selling, or they’re transferring their company to another business and model atm, so beside theirs are very expensive - I now feel the need to DIY one [while I need multiple in the end]. Looking for ways though, christmas is far away still ;), but will try to find some shiny balls…
Yes, the Wavien components are expensive, but they are quite low volume, very specialized (borosilicate with specialized coatings dialed in for the specific wavelengths) and with very tight tolerances. Very difficult to manufacture the RLT correctly and consistently, and currently impossible from worldwide vendors to get an outer datum to reference accurately enough to the inner reflective sphere to make a drop together flashlight. It is then quite time-consuming to actively align to <0.1mm in 3-axes and permanently fix in place in a flashlight that must then pass the FL1 drop tests, etc.
A fun project for sure, but it might be hard to pull off economically.
Wavien has gone dark and is no longer manufacturing anything or replying to contact requests.
Other than finding collars on the used market, the only option would be to buy a custom electroformed reflector, which would be really expensive because no company has a spherical mandrel already made of that size.
Not exactly the case. Marinebeam is still an active licensee, and is still manufacturing the RLT collars for its own commercially available products. Because of licensing restrictions, however, Marinebeam will not sell the components individually at this time.
