The SYNIOSBEAM - CFT90 recoil thrower

That was my point, that you could even keep the (flimsy) cake-pan as the inside or outside, and just coat the outside or inside with the ad hoc fiberglass.

But a nice thick coating of fiberglass is hard without being too brittle, so you can absolutely drill holes in it just fine. (That’s how they mount crossovers, spring-terminals, etc., on the speaker boxes.)

Well ok, I know the XHP70.2 isn’t good for throw but it would give a nice bright beam :slight_smile:
Anyway, that’s just worst case scenario, ideally it will be a CFT90.


A good idea, however I decided against it because I needed to run two cables, two tubing lines, and a temperature probe.
This much stuff will block a lot of light unless I stack them together, in which case I would need about 1/2” arm going to the middle.
At the time the closest I found that was still affordable was a hollow rectangular tube of .75”x1” carbon fiber.
This would take up the same space as 3x .25” arms and just make centering and mounting it more difficult, so I decided to just use a single piece of aluminum and 3x .25” arms :slight_smile:
Also, another problem with stacking the tubing and wires is that I only have ~1/2”–3/4” of space between the glass and edge of the reflector so if I stacked all of them I would need to make the entire light thicker.


I don’t think you can tap holes into carbon fiber or fiberglass though.

Thanks for the info Enderman. Best wishes on your build.

You’re welcome, and thanks :slight_smile:
Phoenix was a pleasure to work with btw, very affordable too.

T-nuts.

Ah good idea.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that I wanted it to be metal because that’s what cools the fluid, copper pipes running on the inside of the body.
This may not always be the case for future builds though.

Do you need a rigid arm at all?
Maybe you could mount the wires/tubing to the lens too? :wink:

Or maybe use 3 bicycle spokes / steel ropes / …?

Maybe you could take the pan, mount tubing to it and then add fiberglass over them together?

If the lens is rigid enough no, but it’s only 3mm acrylic so the aluminum is helping reinforce it from behind.
If it was glass then it would 100% need the aluminum spider.

The thing is, the wires and tubing will block light regardless, so if there is a single arm and the wires/tubing run inside the arm it just makes things neater without really changing the performance.
Maybe in future builds (if I do a retro-reflector again, which is pretty likely) I may do a single arm config. Sorta like this but without the extra bar:

Reducing the size of the middle circle where the LED is can also help improve the usable surface area (but not in this case, because my LED block is not bigger than the reflector hole)

Now you have 3*support area which is strictly larger than 3*tube area.
It shouldn’t be a problem to have little more than 2*tube area blocked because wires can be in the back of the tubes.
Have you considered rigid rectangular tubing? This should enable reducing blocked area even more without increasing thickness. Or maybe have more flexibility in the area-thickness tradeoff.

The tubes are .25” diameter, same as the supprts.
As I said earlier in this post The only tubing I could get at the time was .75” wide which would have taken up the same space as three .25” arms.
If I wanted thinner I would need to stack the tubing and wires and then have to worry about the space between the reflector and glass.
It simply worked out better for strength, ease of centering, and connections to the waterblock to have 3 thin arms instead of 1 thicker one.

If it was a single arm I would need to do some fancy stuff to the waterblock in order to have both inlet and outlet on the same side, currently they are 120 degrees apart which made the machining a lot simpler.

BUILD PROCESS - the reflectors

These are the two PA17.02 aluminum coated reflectors with mounts.
I bought two because I am building two prototypes of this light, one for me and one for someone else.







Datasheet: http://www.phoenixelectroforms.com/uploaded/PA17%20SERIES1.pdf

BUILD PROCESS - the waterblocks

Here are the two waterblocks for the LED, one of them has the barbs screwed on.
If you look at it one way, it looks like a smiley face C: if you look at it the other way it looks like a sad face :C
If I use copper in the future I will need to find a way to machine it myself, because this was a bit too expensive IMO, not worth $133 for a ~$1k flashlight.
They did turn out really good though.




^

Oh my, those reflectors are stunning. The cooper bases look great too. Serious business going on here.

BUILD PROCESS - waterjetting















Unfortunately I accidentally waterjet an old drawing file which had some holes in the wrong spots and was missing a few new holes, so I had to do some manual work to drill additional holes.
I will hopefully have the whole body finished by tomorrow so that I can start mounting components and do the electrical and cooling stuff.

That beats machining. Looking real good to me. :slight_smile:

Thanks :slight_smile:
Hopefully today I get the machining done, only 16 more holes to drill and tap!
I’ve done like 50 so far :stuck_out_tongue:

Love your project!. I am anxious for the results :smiley:

Enderman you are surely not kidding here :wink:

Hope you could earn few $ with your ideas or this is going to be very expensive hobby investment.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Haha thank you :slight_smile: It should pay off in the future, personal projects are really important to employers.
Or who knows, maybe I can start a business when I finish university, lots of options!