[PART 1] Official BLF GT Group Buy thread. Group buy officially closed! Lights shipping.

how about some pictures of the reflectors side by side?

Ah, so Bozlight29 is the dad of Polarweis. Now the above statements make sense. I was confused for a while. Lol

I think I figured it out. I can shrink my hot spot down from 8” to about 6” if I remove the black centering spacer and carefully move the reflector closer to the emitter.

I don’t know if this will have a positive or negative effect when measured further away. I assume it will improve the throw, but I’m not positive.

Polarweis and Bozlight29, do you have different black centering plates? One with big hole and one with small hole? Maybe they are different thicknesses.

This is a possibility.

In looking carefully at my black spacer, I see that it’s a bit warped. The middle sticks up a little.

This could add a little extra height making the hot spot larger.

Possible but the pressure from the reflector should flatten it back out I would assume.

My theory is that Lumintop calculated the exact thickness of the black spacer just right, but with a warped bottom, it’s a tiny bit too tall.

I sanded down the bottom of mine until it was flat. I carefully cleaned it with a brush and a metal tool to get rid of any black pieces of plastic on the edges and in the holes.

Now I’ve got a 6” hot spot compared to an 8” (at 9 feet). That’s sounds better to me.

Tonight I’m gonna take identical distance photos that I did in the past and compare the hot spot and corona sizes.

Yes, but which one is better and which one is worse? I can see they are different at 3 meters, but I can’t say if left or right will better in actual use.

It’s pretty thick. Mine was obviously not flattening out. With the focusing of the reflector such a sensitive thing, a tiny bit of warpage can have a noticable effect.

I probably moved my reflector 1/2 a millimeter closer. That’s a lot! Lol

The smaller the hotspot in a thrower, the better. Your focusing more of the light energy into a tighter, narrower beam pattern.

(Now I wait for Enderman to tell me I’m wrong. :stuck_out_tongue: )

Actually, I have to assume the factory meant for those black spacers to be flat on the bottom. All I did was take a warped spacer and made it flat again.

I’ll do some long distance measuring with it tonight and see if my light is better or worse.

It gets more complicated, my uncle also got a GT :smiley:
Will make a compersion with his light too.

I will make some pictures of the reflector tomorrow in sunlight. And maybe some beamshots tonight.

The black spacer looks the same. Both small hole. I think the reflector quality does make the corona a little bit brighter on my dads light. I dont think its the focus that is the problem.

Haha :stuck_out_tongue:
Having a small hotspot on a wall 3m away is not the same as having a small hotpsot at a far distance.
I guess you’ll find out if it helped or not when you take the measurements :slight_smile:

We are almost ready for some beamshots in the Belgium Ardennes. This GT is a great light, whatever the corona or hotspot looks like, the long shots are showing what this light is capable of. The comparison between the GT’s is part of the hobby, not criticism on the GT or it’s designers and producers. Wednesday we can do a comparison of three GT’s, when Megabassie arrives at the scene. Maybe now some folks understand why we are happy the GT’s arrived just in time before our holidays. In Amsterdam is not so much room for large beamshots...

Both of my GT’s centering ring bars were trapped by the hold down screws to the point that they had to be pried off. I opened them up till they floated on the hold down screws. As you can see in this picture, the hold down screws are narrower as compared to the centering ring bar clearance holes. This could cause the centering ring detail, not to sit flat due to the interference, how is it supposed to sit Flat when it’s trapped between the screws, this thing should float to allow the reflector to center to the LED, and the mcpcb hold down screws to the centering ring detail should act as a anti rotate.

The centering ring bar measured 2.48mm thick all the way across the board, regardless of the warp on both of my examples, and now measure .012” thinner since machining it. Now in my case, I’m running a clean de-domed XHP35 HD E4-1A, and during the course of tuning the reflector to the clean de-domed LED, I had to move the reflector up .004” to gain the highest LUX measurement at 20M. I made shims out of Precision Brand Plastic Gauge stock.

I made quit a few, of different thickness’s because my other GT is running a XHP70.2, so I played around with Focusing this 70.2 LED too. Now all this has changed a bit again after doing Endermans Tuning Procedure.

So Jason if you need a shim to get your GT back in focus, because .500mm is a huge difference, let me know what size/thickness you need, I have quite a few extra! :wink:

I’m just guessing .500mm. It might be closer to .250mm. I didn’t bother to measure. I said screw it, let’s just flatten this sucker and see what happens. Lol

Just made some first long distance beamshots with my dad. This light is sick. Almost no difference with long beamshots.

My registered packets came here.The first,passed below Customs radar,but for the second,they ask PayPal receipt so as they set it free for delivery.I will send Neal’s August advance payment of course.

I just measured my hotspot at exactly 3 m from the lens, i measured just over 13 cm, so 13/2,54=5,11” so i think i’m good

Has anyone tried putting a hotspot on clouds? I think the lowest cloud types are around 2000 metres.