Nice try Pat!
I was drugged Tuesday, from Monday nights issues, DHL brought new Cutter T-Pad quad boards Tuesday around 2:00 in the afternoon and I had just gotten the new XP-G3’s last week. I felt the need to use the new boards so I grabbed up the components needed… I’ve got small Omten and large Omten switches, but I don’t have switch boards sitting around. I only had the lighted board because someone was nice enough to give me a couple to play with. At any rate, I grabbed what was readily available and headed out to the shop. I didn’t even take a rubber boot out there, so I guesstimated how thick the overall stack would be with the switch pcb, switch, cover plate and boot, cut the necessary pocket into the end of the battery tube and threaded it. Winging it, as it were. I remember pilotdog68 saying these pcbs were very robust and I didn’t need to worry about a through-board bypass, so it made sense to use one here.
The sedative I take is Ativan, used to sort of reboot my system. I have stress and/or cold related muscle spasms (medically referred to as a Conversion Disorder), if I get chilled it can happen and I can get a chill from a breeze on a 105º day when I’m sweating. Difficult to know really just what starts the process, even after nearly 16 years of it. I only take the sedative when the spasms make my head shake violently side to side. This has occurred often enough that over the years that now I get an instant splitting headache and Monday night it was bad enough to make me nauseous. So Tuesday, I had the micro concussion feeling as well as the left-over sedation… groggy, bit of a stagger, probably shouldn’t have worked on the lathe at all. I didn’t go out til like 2:30PM, but then I didn’t come back in til just after 8:30! Lost all track of time, but had TexasLumens’ voice nagging me about safety and keeping fingers and such. lol So yeah, I was making the effort to be careful, but did start getting hurried considering the time and that I hadn’t eaten and darkness was taking over. (the rats move into the shed at dark, and possibly a skunk, so I try to be gone…) I live in the country, there’s cattle fields surrounding the shed and hay stacked outside one wall, heck the adjoining section of shed is a stall and hay loft! So the varmints are to be expected, even if it’s a bit eerie.
As far as mad skills or the use of the lathe, it’s Justin’s fault. It’s all Justin’s fault. Him and his crazy Scratch Build Challenges. That’s where it all started for me back with the .50 BMG flashlight build. So his challenge started it, now the lathe that came from him (and BLF) and so it goes, isn’t that always how “mad scientists” get created?
Appreciate the compliments, really I do, am humbled.
When you learn to do things, you also criticize your work. Shoulda done this, coulda done that… and sometimes you re-do things that should have been left alone! I now have to take this DBC2 back apart and address how the driver is mounted. I need to make a threaded brass retaining ring to hold it down firmly and make better ground contact and will probably have to cut some threads off the end of the battery tube to keep fitment proper. (Sounds simple enough, right? I’ll probably have to seat the driver a bit deeper in the copper, so I’ll have to be cutting down into the hole where the threads are, easy to mess up copper threads by the way!)
Scary, as I really really like how the light is right now. But you know, it’s an addiction…