The 6th Annual BLF / Old Lumens Scratch Made Light Contest

Oh wow! :heart_eyes:

Well, those are pretty… What can you make out of two 30mm x 40mm pieces? They’re a bit short and wide for most flashlight shapes.

Could be a set of ten keychain-sized 10180 lights, or maybe combined for a 26350 thrower, or maybe split up for three 14500 lights.

Could make the Timascus into a head and tail, and the Mokume-gane the mid-section, adding a portion of pure copper for the pill. Quad-bore the Mokume-gane for 4x14500 in series and make the light a triple or quad XHP-35 mini-powerhouse!

Or just a 30000 lumens camping lantern …

:smiley: That would be something Dale’s style :sunglasses:
Those are some pretty nice pieces! I don’t know what you’ll do, but I’m sure it will be classy!

Good luck! Looking forward to see your thread as well :+1:

Y’all are killin me! :laughing:

Y’all’s math is horrible though. Side by side 14500’s take up almost 30mm of space, these are only 29.8mm wide. 4x 14500 would need a much fatter piece. Nice try though. But of course the 40mm length also isn’t compatible with 50mm long cells. Oh well.

BUT, David is onto something, which I’ve already been laying out. A Quad with a copper engine, 16340 cell powering an LED4Power 4A driver in constant current, with the copper/brass as the body and caps of the Titanium damascus top and bottom. :wink: I REALLY want it to be a side switch, that would solve some space problems, but don’t know if I can pull that off and sure don’t want to mess up this gorgeous piece of Mokume Gane trying… probably heat color the Titanium a rich blue to oppose the orange of the copper. Should be interesting…

Doesn’t have to be mega powerful, the 80 CRI Samsung LH351D’s at 5000K should suffice to make a nice beam profile and decent color, but I’ll look into that aspect more later as TK is telling me the Carclo optics don’t play all that nicely with her Samsungs.

Jewelry grade light, haven’t done that before! lol

(Hmmmm, 4x10440…… )

Oh yeah! This is gonna be awesome to watch! :partying_face:

That’s some gorgeous metal. I can’t wait to see what you come up with, Dale!

Bump :star:

I’m going to be throwing my hat into the ring soon. I have a number of projects in mind that I’ve been wanting to build for a while though some of them would probably be too complex for this contest’s time frame given my stack of life’s other obligations and basically a total lack of budget right now. So this will have to one of the simpler ideas floating around in my head. That said, it will be one of my more useful lights if I can build it the way I want, with a proper U/I.

Unfortunately, I’m not very knowledgable with electronics or programming still so I will have to use an existing driver with existing firmware.

Light body will be hand made with a minimum of power tools, since both my mill and lathe are non-functional at the moment. Lathe needs a gearbox repair, and mill is 3 phase in a single phase shop and right now I can’t afford the VFD I want to use as a phase converter.

Sketches forthcoming as soon as I solidify some ideas. Right now I want to build a simple proof of concept test mule before I get all fancy with making the body.

Hints:

It will not be cylindrical.
It will be small enough for neck lanyard wear.
It will not be like anything else out there.
Probably mostly copper. But I do have some aluminum, and stainless I could use as well…still waffling on that.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll build 2.

Ahah, another project :wink: Let’em come and show us what you’re thinking about :wink: Take your time and good luck!
Don’t forget to see post #1 for the essential information :+1:

I’m back to rattling around ideas. I ‘was’ planning on making a recoil light but the reflectors that came in were terrible. Please excuse the word in the pics, I wasn’t too happy at the time. Of course I contacted the seller and they said it will wash off, which it didn’t and not amount of buffing or polishing would work either because the problem is on the other side of the glass. Square one for me :person_facepalming:

Maybe I’ll take a slightly different direction. Does anyone know where I can get a decent large aspheric lens?

How large is “large”?

Edmund $cientific, maybe?

Enderman would know. But nice aspherics cost lots of money. :money_mouth_face: :money_mouth_face: :money_mouth_face:

One alternative is to mirror your own glass. Rustoleum has a mirroring spray-paint now. If you’re sure the mirror you have is the right shape, you might be able to clean off all that messed up coating and re-coat it with Rustoleum Mirror Effect paint.

Here’s a video showing how well it works:

Hmmmm… looks like it could be pricey for an aspheric. I might save a few bucks at thorlab instead of Edmunds but a uf-1504 (or is it 1405???) Would still work out cheaper.

That mirror paint is a good idea but will add more time to the build.

I’ll think about it :slight_smile:

Mind blowing David! Thanks for showing that!

Well, maybe it will be useful to somebody! :smiley:

I plan to try it out myself sometime, maybe to make a flashlight reflector or maybe to make an infinity mirror (or both).

New entry in hand made: The 6th Annual BLF / Old Lumens - Handmade Entry - i42dk (FAIL)

Looks like a great idea to me. Go and check the thread! :slight_smile: