Inspired by some old cranky guy I've been playing with copper lately. And the asked if anyone made their own clip.... Well here is my first try.
And here is a shot of the finished clip in use.
Note about picture size. I share a 0,3 Mbit connection with 20 guys onboard an oiltanker so they are small in order not to impede everybody elses connection.. It is on purpose. Hope you can live with it!
Here goes.
I've trimmed a thin ring of copper and sanded it to have parallel long sides. Then I have bent it around a pipe with a diameter a little smaller than the flashlight. Then I have cut off the excess with tin snips. And sanded the cut so the short sides are parallel too. Then I have sanded it with sandpaper till it looked nice.
Then I just vent and drew a wedge type clip. Cut it out with tin snips. Then decided I wanted the short sides rounded so they dont catch everything going in/out of my pockets.
Took a piece of wood and used it as a hammer since it makes less marks in the copper then an actual one. Again I beat it on a piece of pipe a little smaller than the OD of the flashlight. This beating may sound very deliberate but trust me, if you can envision how you want it to look then your vision of how to beat it is probably spot on.
After the beating it has same round diameter as the flashligt (close at least)
Then I just decided I wanted it to have a bend. So I held it at an angle to the pipe and beat the end of the copper strip. Good enough.
Then to get the free end back to somewhere close to parallel to the flashlight body I placed it on the end of the pipewith the bend sticking out and beat it until it had a sharpish edge. A little more beating to make the bend again and more to make the edge again and I was pretty happy. Sorry that I did not take photos of this part of the process. I think I need to do that.
Now i sanded the pieces until they looked nice.
Then i just spent 20 minutes trying to find tis picture on imageshack because of the slow connection! Argh!
Just to show how I held it all together. The plier had the handles taped together to let me have my hands free.
I've applied a bit of grease like flux to one side of the copper parts and the crocodile clip jut holds it together. The I just wait until the parts are hot enough to melt the solder. I just try once in a while until it works.
How much solder to use? Well I used about 5 mm of solder for this. And for reference the soldered surface is about 10x5 mm. And I think I used a bit too much for this.
BTW I chose to solder it on the flashlight tube (with innards removed) because I wanted to be sure it could get on the tube after soldering. No harm done to the ano.
Here it is cooling down.
And here you see how it is fixed to the flashlight :-)
Right after soldering the copper is really soft because the heat has annealed it. But you will feel it stiffening up within even 1 days use. Dont be afraid to correct it when it has been bend out of shape or angle because the movement will help it to get stiffer.
Enjoy!
