Recently I built a pair of torches for which I could find no led centering ring (an E21A S2+ and a Luxeon V Jaxman M8).
I thought about 3D printing them, and after a bit of research I found a website that offered laser prints using nylon (https://www.vectorealism.com/), with reasonably low tolerances and a reasonable price for small orders. So I modelled a bit of stuff and had it printed:
- 3 Luxeon MZ rings for 7mm reflector hole
- 3 Luxeon V 7mm
- 3 nichia E21A 7mm
- 2 Quad E21A 7mm
- 2 21mm rings to center a 20mm optic in the S2+ head
here is a pic of the file used:
I got them today, they look pretty good
So I tried them out, first the Luxeon V one, it fits perfectly
Pretty satisfied with that one, it’s basically perfect
Then I tried the one for the E21A, I found two problems:
- minimum print thickness for the process is 0.8mm, which is far too tall for the E21A. This is easily solved by sanding the bottom of the spacer a bit, structural integrity didn’t seem to suffer.
- when tightening the reflector, the spacer completely destroyed the ceramic casing / phospor of the led, so now I have a royal blue chip directly soldered to an high performance pcb (this might turn out fun seeing as in Clemence’s test the led without phospor can take a lot of current). I think with how fragile the E21A is, a round spacer hole is necessary. This might not be a problem with quad E21A’s because the leverage should be less than half, but I’d still rather modify my design to have a round hole.
I expect the Luxeon MZ spacer to work just as well as the one for the luxeon V, and I’ll probably use it for a future build. The S2+ triple centering ring hasn’t been tested because my only S2+ triple has a soldered pcb so the optics can’t really move.
If anybody is interested in the files, I can upload them in various formats,but you need to find some place (i think the website I used is Italy-only) that can laser print, I think the common filament technique is too imprecise. Also make sure the material used can whitstand the temperature inside a flashlight close to the led. There was a much more accurate printing option that I avoided because of price and low heat tolerance, but I’m thinking it might be usable for single emitter low power E21A builds.