Monkey King staff

Just so you know where the name came from - Thanks CRX
:disguised_face:

A little while back I found a pic of a CWF Pele paisley….

OMG! I loved the look of it :heart_eyes: … but not enough to pay that sort of money :confounded:

I don’t have a 4th axis (but I dream about it) and I don’t reckon I could do any kind of etching that would be up to par so the paisley light remained out of reach for me.

Until now!! I found a ready made tube that can be machined into a torch. I’ve converted 1-2 mechanical mods before but wasn’t intending on going that route again. With the discovery of this one I couldn’t help myself and bought one in gold and one in brass.

Items arrived. I’m gonna work on the gold one first. I’ve since discovered the driver pictured is e-switch and I’ll need to order up some clicky compatible drivers as I’m all out at the moment.

One end will need boring out

While the other end has a rather deep threaded section (to suit the switch they used)

The top section of the vape (I don’t know the techy terminology) seems to have the paisley etched in a different scale, and possibly a stretched/distorted pattern. I’ll try and use it if I can.

After some head scratching and chicken scratching I came up with a plan. No need to see that so I’ll move onto the lathe work. For making the head I’m showing each step with a pic so this might get a bit slow and tedious.

Titanium bar stock

Cut

Thread

O-ring groove

Cooling fins

Drill the end

Bore it out with a step for the driver to sit in

Thread for a driver retaining ring

Roughly work out how where to cut the other end and give it a quick cut

Cut off

Spin it around and mount it to work the other end

Drill it

Because the boring out is not very deep but kind of wide I used tungsten carbide router bit. This makes the base of the hole relatively flat (compared to a conventional drill bit) and much easier to clean up with the boring bar.

You can see I had a little bit of chatter but I was going nice and slow at low revs so it looks worse than it sounded

Finish boring out with the boring bar

Press fit the top section of the vaper. It had a little step part way down the inside so I had to press it on halfway and bore it out some then press it the rest of the way.

Cut it back and think about how to do the next part. This isn’t really a step but I took a pic anyway.

I might’ve missed a pic here. The gold ring was cut back enough to make a thread and o-ring groove. I went with the slightly finer thread of 0.7mm here.

Main part of the head is finished. Still need to make a bezel and driver retaining ring to finish the head.

Excellent work! :+1: You may have created a new market, income stream for yourself.

I can’t wait to see the final build. Very awesome idea! Good luck with the build. We’re watching…

WOW,
very nice work! will be following this to see the final product.

Cheers :beer:

Knew I was good for something :smiley:
Ruyi Jingu Bang :wink:

Simply orsm. Now we know what we were waiting for and it was worth it. Looking forward to the finish. :+1:

Pinkpanda, that looks seriously cool. Also it is always nice to see those detailed machining pics and show us your skills as well as the results.

Looking foward for more pictures !

That looks great. Wish I had your lathe skills!

Why steel?

Awesome work PinkPanda!!!

Where’s the group buy for the completed light? :student:

Are you saying you’re no good at making/modding lights?? Is that why you need to practice so much ? :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

…and you’re saying you’re gettting a group together to buy one light…? :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Lol, just jokes. Thanks guys :beer:

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EDIT- I missed this first time round….

Titanium :crown:

Daaaayum! That’s beautiful, PP. Can’t wait to see more.

I resent that fact! :smiley:
This light should be interesting :+1:

A little more done today.

I mounted the main tube and was about to start boring when I thought I probably should take a pic

Bored out with the router bit first

Finish boring with the boring bar

Cut the thread and step for the o-ring. I almost had a disaster here. I said to myself ‘remember to change the thread gearing back to 1mm as it’s on 0.7mm from last time’ but I just had to change the cutting bits and set the other stuff and, of course, forgot to change the gearing. DOH! :person_facepalming: So the first pass was at 0.7mm, as it was cutting I could tell something was different by the number of revs it took to move 1mm on the Z axis DRO (digital read out). I have a rough idea of the revs because when I thread I turn at the lowest speed my lathe allows for (80rpm) whilst having a handle mounted to the back end of the spindle. I thread under power until it gets close to the end of thread then I finish by turning the spindle by hand. After changing back to 1mm there was luckily still enough meat on the tube to not affect the final thread.

Damn, that was a lot of explaining. I hope it makes sense. If not the short story is I nearly stuffed it but didn’t :innocent:

The reason the thread is all dirty is because of the way I get the male-female ends to match up. When it gets close to the right diameter I slow up and take fine passes, checking with the mating part each time. When it screws on 1 thread or so but is still too tight to go any further then I wipe grinding paste on the parts and work it on by hand. Having the other side mounted in the tail stock collet makes it easier to grab and to work it back and forward. This process is a little slow and tedious but it makes for a tight but smooth feeling thread. When both parts are titanium I have to get the tolerance between the parts closer before I can do this process.

Here it is wiped clean

…and the 2 parts together

Think I’ll work on the bezel next

Amazing workmanship!!! . :+1: . Thanks for sharing… :slight_smile:

Just beautiful!

Thanks for sharing your journey with this project.

Sweet. :beer:
When I get a thread to start a thread or two I will take a couple of thou off the side of the thread which generally gets the threads nice and tight when screwed together.

Holy crap! I normally prefer plain jane work horse lights but this is amazing.

WOW

I could read your threads and CRX’s all day, Panda. This is art. For real, I’m already betting it’ll be even prettier than the Ti-Mo.