The SYNIOSBEAM - CFT90 recoil thrower

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!

BUILD PROCESS - electronics


Spent many hours tonight soldering, got about 50% of the electronics done.
Battery carriers, balance and change plugs, and switches.








Nice garage. I couldn’t see where the beer fridge was. :slight_smile:
Diggin the work. :+1:

Haha thanks, I wish I had a garage with thousands of dollars of equipment like that.
Beer fridge is upstairs in another room :stuck_out_tongue: Don’t tell anyone though! It’s disguised as a pop vending machine!

BUILD PROCESS - more electronics

About 50% done wiring now, and the body actually fits together well too, although it is not finished machining.
Planning how to fit and heatsink the drivers in the tiny 1 cubic inch of space I have left :stuck_out_tongue:

Only wiring left is attaching the voltage and temperature meters, pump, and LED driver to the white connector block.
And also the LED to the driver.

This week I will definitely finish the body and hopefully next week I can start working on the liquid cooling!





FASTAAAA! :wink:

Have you thought about polishing it to make it look fancy?
What about mounting the lens? Do you have O-Rings?

It will get black anodized when it is done machining and test-fitting everything :smiley:

The lens will go on top of the spider.
I plan to put some neoprene tape on the spider so that the lens doesn’t directly constant the metal, this will act as a sort of o-ring.
Neoprene will work better than an o-ring because an o-ring this large will have trouble keeping it’s round shape.
The neoprene sticks on like tape so I just need to put a strip all the way around the spider and that will make it water resistant :slight_smile:

Since only one side is adhesive I will also have 6 screws around the front of the light keeping the lens from falling out.
This also means the lens is easily removable.

Impressive stuff! Perhaps the folks of Mercedes are actually Illuminati? :smiley:

Subscribed! Will be fun to see it’s performance as compared with a Maxabeam.