I have a few projects I am doing here while practising Stay-At-Home as requested by the NM Governor. Making some picture frames, doing some renovations to my converted cargo trailer camper, taxes, and other fun stuff. I decided I would work in a flashlight build.
I am using parts that I have on hand. Some I have had for a while, like the 3 volt XHP50.2 and the lexel driver pictured below. The XHP50.2 is one of several I bought when they first came out in 3 volt versions. It is on a 16mm Noctigon. The 17mm Lexel driver is from either Lexel’s batch one or two from a few years ago. It has Narsil firmware. I temporarily wired them up to see if they actually worked. Yes, they did. (The mcpcb was fitted to a finned aluminum heat sink for testing).
This pill is from a P60 kit I believe.
I ground flats on the pill in three places. Then I silver soldered the pill to a strip of 18 gauge copper, cut to 3/4” wide. One flat is on the bottom where the pill rests on the copper. The second flat is seen on the side, the third flat is on the opposite side. The side flats were needed to reduce the width to less than 3/4”. I’m using the pill because I have had it a long time and it is a ready made mount for the mcpcb and the driver.
I have a short leftover length of the 1” x 1.5” x 1/8” wall aluminum tubing that was used to construct my 7th O-L contest entry. I may as well use it up in this project.
Here the copper strip and pill are inserted in the aluminum tube.
The pill slipped sideways a little when the molten solder was drawn in between the pill and copper strip. Just enough to be off center a wee bit but not enough to collide with the side of the aluminum tube. I may reheat and slide it over later. This is just to test fit it inside a scrap of the tubing. The aluminum tube has inside radiused corners so I chamfered the bottom edges of the copper to allow the strip to fit flush against the aluminum.
I epoxied a piece of lexan to one end of the aluminum tube. The section of steel tube is weight to hold the lexan in place till the epoxy set. (2 pair of glasses; a +2.5 and a +5.)
Here’s the lexan in place. I’ll trim it tomorrow. I only had long cure epoxy.
More later; tomorrow maybe, maybe not.