Hi guys,
I hope this year I get around to actually build something.
I’ll browse through my stuff and hopefully get some inspiration on the weekend.
2nd August 2015
So, I finally got a free weekend at home!
(I work in a different City then the people I care about live in, so I only work and sleep here, leave Fridays early and am back Sunday evening. I have to admit it’s not that easy to motivate myself to do any stuff then. But I’m working on it. )
Of course the postal service didn’t manage to deliver my material (esp. my reflector) in time, what a disappointment.
I’ll try to use my Nichia COB that I didn’t use last year.
It’s rated to produce about 2000lm @ CRI90 / 5000k at about 22W.
If things work well I might upgrade to the 40W module.
I don’t want an aspheric lens anymore but found a nice 12° reflector for those COBs.
(12° Ledil Barbara )
Inspiration are those old box lights like Daimon.
I wish I hat better photographing skills so you could appreciate just how beautiful this gold on ceramic looks. For the moment this picture has to do.
Well, at least my brass sheet metal was in the mail, maybe I get next week some time to plan the light body when the reflector arrives.
16th August 2015
(as usual, all images should be clickable for larger ones.)
I can finally ‘think out loud’ how the light could be build now.
I want 8 AA cells. Some kind of heat sink should be the strong backbone of the light.
Forced air might be necessary even with the small emitter. Don’t know how exactly I’m going to build a half decent working heatsink, though. That alone is a good argument for lots of airflow.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get the correct emitter holder for the reflector, so I’ll have to improvise there a bit.
I still want it to be at least somewhat hand-holdable, but I guess I’ll have to add some kind of handle and/or strap for holding.
I also started cutting first shapes out of the sheet metal.
While I wanted to use thinner brass then in 2013 which was really painful to work with with my available tools, I feel that 0.3mm is to thin. I’ll need to reinforce in some spots or maybe opt for parts in 0.5mm later.
Now I need to find a place where I can try brazing the brass. I feel neither my apartment nor the sidewalk are the right place. City live is quite annoying.
I also want an option for a low mode, but I think driving such a big higher voltage emitter at very low current won’t be very efficient. For sure not with a slapped together driver.
For that reason I’ll probably add a nice little emitter, probably that NFSW385A.
5000k CRI83, probably >180lm/W in the single digit lumen range.