WAVIEN collars are BACK! Are you interested? [group buy over]

You can see the archived poll results on the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221220093741/https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/72807

After a long debate, they might come back!
My contact at Marinebeam has been negotiating with Meadowstar to make a limited run of collars.
These collars will cost about $50, but be even better quality than the previous wavien collars.
They are 32mm outer diameter 25mm inner diameter only (so the ‘small’ size), and have the same 60 degree opening because “wavien found it was a good compromise between performance and efficiency” as we predicted.
.
If you are interested please reply to the poll, they want to know approximately how many people are interested in buying, if enough people are interested they will do a limited production run.
They also have high quality 50mm aspheric lenses that they will sell, however they didn’t say the price.

This may be the last chance to get wavien collars affordably.
Optics companies like knight optical told me it would cost several thousand dollars to get some custom made by them even if they don’t have a cold mirror coating, just with cheap aluminum coating.
Getting them from a company like phoenix electroforms would also cost at least $1000 for a custom made mandrel.

In case you are not familiar with what a wavien collar is or what it’s for:

A glass cold-mirror coated hemispherical reflector with a hole in it is placed above an LED, with the LED at the center of the ‘sphere’.
This more than doubles the intensity of the LED, for use with aspheric lens flashlights and superthrowers.
Due to double the intensity, it also doubles the light output from the lens.
This is called “light recycling technology” because without the collar, all the light emitted to the sides of the LED gets wasted by not hitting the lens.

Ok that’s a good start.

I thought you were mainly interested in larger collars for your projects?

For me $50 for a 1” collar is a bit much however to gulp, swallow, but if this is as good as it gets then by all means peeps buy one.

I’m gonna wait until you go into producing these yourself so I can get a helluva BLF discount. :laughing:

I like larger ones, but they basically work the same and wouldn’t fit in many people’s flashlights.

I can’t produce them myself, it takes a lot of resources to make something of that quality, which is why knight optical told me it would cost several thousand for just one collar.
Also even if I could, I would get sued :confused: so this is pretty much the only way to get them.

What hosts would these work properly in? Would using them require making your own host?

So these are better than the previous ones.

Do you know what is/are the improvement(s)?

I’m also curious about these. Why this specific size? Does it fit in existing things or is this just a common size they had? Can a normal human use these or do I have to build this around precise measurements for it to be worth it?

Any lens flashlight that has an area around the LED that can fit 32mm.
Of course you can make your own host if you want too.

They mentioned that one of the issues with the previous collars was that to make the opening hole they sliced the top off the dome, which wasn’t ideal for concentricity.
Marinebeam isn’t the factory mass producing them so they don’t know how they changed the manufacturing process to fix that.
I assume other improvements like coating quality and stuff like that also apply, since they mentioned it is “a lot better”

I would suggest looking up some of the flashlight mods that use wavien collars on google.
This size is the same size as the old wavien collar ‘small’ version.
As long as you can fit it in the flashlight head you can simply use layers of tape to adjust the height, glue it in place, and then your aspheric thrower will have 2x the intensity.

Height should be about sin(60) × 12.5mm = ≈10.825mm, doesn't it? Pretty compact.

I really don't know where to stick this in but I guess I'll end up coming up with something LoL.

Overseas shipping cost?

Cheers ^:)

Yup that should be about the height, maybe a few mm more if they’re cutting the hole at an angle rather than slicing.

You would get sued for one piece?It reminds me Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”…
But who would learn that it was a replica?You could have bought it somehow.

So you’re still negotiating, right?

Tell them that Notta’s offering 3 for $60 including shipping. (These are uber lightweight.)

This small size IMO warrants a better deal than 1 for $50. I’m messing around with head housings that are starting at 2 1/2 times this size.

What I don’t want to do is to get one set up right and then have to take it apart to the next experimentation.

Do they know how much hassle it can take to get focusing just right?

Who wants to mess with all that time wasted to set up the next one?

Point being this’ll cost me a lot more than $50 in my time to buy only one.

And I ain’t buying 3 @$50/each.

So if they’re looking at potential future business to accommodate those bigger head housings someday (and I bet others are thinking the same way) then they need to grease this first sled a bit better for me to want to ride the next one. If there is a next one. If there isn’t then I’m luke warmly interested in these dinky ones.

:disguised_face:

Is it bad of me to be thinking about spraying half a ping-pong ball with mirror paint?

You just made me one good rib hurt. :laughing: :beer:

If I could somehow make them myself and just use them that would be fine.
If I sold them or sold flashlights that sued them that would be very illegal.

They already agreed with the patent holder that they could produce some but wanted to first know how many people would be interested in buying.
It takes me about 5 minutes to focus my wavien collar, done it plenty of times.
The marginal improvement from a larger size doesn’t matter that much, it’s only a few percent.
The main point of a larger size is if you have stuff around the LED that need clearance, like soldered wires, huge die size, etc.
btw $56 is about the same price the old wavien small collars used to be.

Google “DIY wavien collar” and there’s a thread on BLF about exactly that kind of stuff :wink:
There’s nothing that even comes close to a cold-mirror coated glass reflector though.

I have a built Uniquefire UF-1405 aspheric one of these might fit in. I may be in for one. I’ll have to think about it.

Does anyone have any experience sticking a wavien collar in this particular host?

How about having half-sphere pieces of glass properly crafted and sliced, then outside spray painted with mirror effect spray LoL?

Cheers ^:)

That is a special arrangement you made! :+1:

I would buy one, and probably also a quality 50mm lens, but I would have to know the focal length and if the lens has a small rim to clamp it behind a bezel (and if the 50mm is measured with or without the rim). And the price must be reasonable of course.