JoshK's Machine Made Light for the 8th Annual BLF/OL Contest

That’s the LED I’ve been leaning towards for my build as well. I’m thinking sw45k. To help with the decision I’m probably going to throw a 219B in my Thrunite T10TV2 (if I can get it open).

Yea I nearly sold it but here we go, I found a use.

I’ve drawn the basic shell so that I can start developing this. It’s no bigger than necessary to get the basic parts inside and have ‘corners’ thick enough to be printable and not break easily.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t see any of your pictures Joshk.

Weird. Ok, so moved them all off Dropbox to my server. Give it a try now.

I can see them, and I could see them before.

They're currently being hosted on:

blf.asupgrade.com

(I haven't heard of that site before.)

I’ll probably get back to this project tomorrow. The A/C in our house went out 2 weeks and nobody has been sleeping good. We thought we had a repairman lined up, but he couldn’t seem to show up or call back. There’s a new company here today and they have been working hard all day long.

Ooooff! I’m not sure where you live but there are many areas in the US where I would not want to be without A/C in August. I hope tomorrow is nice and cool inside for you.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed our high of 82F today here in the mountains. Above 80F lasted all of about 2-1/2 hours. Sunny day too. 8800 feet altitude does that.

I plan to get back at my project in a day or two as well; we’ve just been hiking a lot, taking afternoon naps and reading books.

I’m a lifelong South Dakotan that has been in Arkansas the past 2 years. I’m not used to heat, humidity, or stagnant air. Arkansas has had all 3, plus some heat advisories in the past few weeks. It’s been 80–98 humidity day and night the whole time. (96% at the moment). And the heat has been in the 90’s every day and 80’s each night. And never any wind.

Well the crew finished up a bit ago and left. The house is cooling off and drying. What a relief. I don’t even miss the $3800 they took with them when they left. Money well spent.

:+1:

I left a window open too much last night. This morning I ran the split mini in heat mode in the kitchen / dining area for a little. (Solar driven)

What do you have for a solar setup? Is it lead or lithium?
I’ve been slowly collecting laptop batteries for a solar project of my own in the future.

Two pole mount pv panel arrays with trackers plus a ground mount array facing southish. Outback controllers and inverters. GBS prismatic LiFePO4 cells in 48 volt configuration.

:+1: Sorry for the tangent. My mind wanddddddddddddddddddd

Mine too :person_facepalming:

Alright, back at it today. So obviously if I put that MCPCB inside a plastic shell it would overheat and then melt my flashlight. So we need to go metal. Let’s look at those options. This is model is hollow as shown above.

Obviously copper would be best, but at $756 plus shipping that would be a poor choice. Steel for $116 might be acceptable if it were guaranteed my design contained no errors, but there are no such guarantees. Furthermore, all that gets you is a powdery piece of metal. This old SLS printing technology from 1988 has a very rough surface that makes large threads suck, and small threads don’t even print.
So from this pricing I can see the path forward is a hybrid design. With a plastic body, but a metal tip. I may even plan to solder the LED direct to the body on two contacts to avoid the issue of how to attach the MCPCB securely.

What’s that thing AVE on youtube says about the tip?

The Steel price of $23 is pretty good, but I wouldn’t be able to solder to that. The Brass would probably solder fine, it costs $77. Even so, with shipping and one re-order this might cost nearly $200 in the end, and that’s not counting other parts and time. That’s not a good price either.

Welcome to the RED Zone, mid south is Hot too, maybe worse with little air flow.
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Nice drawing and planning :+1:


The nice thing about doing most of the work at the computer is I can be in the house rather than out in the garage. When I saw my wife hydro-dipping out on the deck I decided to try my hand at it. :stuck_out_tongue: My hand got covered in paint. But check out my YT play button in red/white/blue :partying_face: It has issues, but it’s my first attempt ever.

Then we went in the pool.

OMG :open_mouth:
Looks like your fingers have been shredded in a blender. Sure that’s not blood ?
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