Great work! I think i’ll try your method when i get more vials
I got a good deal on a few different coloured 3x25mm tritium vials last year and
made some of these simpler keyfobs using 5mm clear tube and resin
I attached them to a bunch of different coloured Thrunite Ti’s and gave them as
little Christmas gifts to some friends & family. Went down really well with the non flashaholics
Those are also very nice, much nicer than the standard bulky ebay ones. It is a pity that there isn't more variety out there (exept the super-expensive custom made metal trit holders).
Thanks for the link, I had not been there before. I had seen some of his flashlights that he posted here, but these other things he makes are just as nice, and not that expensive.
Perhaps the first version that used a tube inside would increase the trit’s protection enough for a plastic white/frosted keychain? Can’t find anything on ver 1 tho.
After 5 years of hard time on my keychain, the fob looks like this:
It survived well, many bits have chipped off but the trits themselves are not exposed yet. It still looks amazing in the dark.
I had bought a small collection of trits a couple of years ago with good intentions to do something nice with them, but never did that. And trits do fade over time so today I just made them into keyfobs, basically like the the one in the OP, but now with a milky white perspex base, to try something different.
I first did a test pouring some resin on a bit of (partly finely sanded, partly shiny) perspex without trits to see if the adhesion of the polyester onto the perspex was good. It seemed that they formed one piece, but with a chisel and hammer I could split it partly along the transition plane from perspex to polyester, but not where it was sanded.
So I reckoned with some sanding of the perspex it was good enough, and made two fobs using 4 and 2 trits.
Sanding them in shape
And after polishing with subsequently 180, 1000, 3000, 5000, 7000 grit sandpaper and last with some white copier paper. And drilled holes in them.
The polishing is not perfect, I should finish it sometime. It does give an idea of the finished fobs. Now they are finished and I can see the effect of the white layer, I like the original transparent version better, but these are nice too
Interesting article, but the restproduct of the process is not tritium but O18 (radioactive oxigen). But in any case, without having much knowledge about that, I would think that the cost of making tritium vials is hardly in the littlebit of tritium used, but in the high-end technology of making the vials.
First a colleague who wanted a leather key fob made a sample (not on the pics, but the same compound material as the blue form).
From that sample I made the yellow silicone mold which was also used for the epoxy resin head.
I mixed 2 portions of epoxy with red respectively red epoxy paint and poured them into the mold, the first try looked like this:
More details:
Cheers!
Opps, I haven’t realized that the first try is on the other picture already, hope you don’t mind