I am happy someone has been inspired by my ramblings. The mirror looks like a brought one
They were originally made with an iron die. A piece glass substrate was placed on top then the whole thing put in a furnace and heated until the glass sagged into the die. Then the key was to vacuum it so that the glass was sucked tight against the iron.
Would it be possible to CNC a die from a computer model? It would probably still need polishing by hand to get it prefectly smooth. There is a company who resilvers and restores antique mirrors so the part is sorted just need the sbustrate.
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No, here are some pics of that profile pot full of Crawfish, sausage, corn, potato, garlic, lemon, onion, and Zatarain’s crab/crawfish boil. :+1:
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Notice the piece of aluminum under the burner, it was used for the pot lid light ! LOL
It was painted on the under side, was going in a CH47, the guy cut it too small and it went to the scrap dumpster.
CHI let us take scrap home, so there was plenty of pickings dumpster diving. LOL
Here’s a picture from work of the vacuum chuck on the Moore M40 CNC diamond-turning lathe—40” of travel in the x-axis for turning large optics, usually aluminum or copper.
And a project from last year for a parabolic aluminum mirror, no silver needed. It will be recut soon to change the prescription slightly for testing.
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” grin ” you should know that your work has the attention of many here at BLF, Thanks for sharing your fun with us
Answer to your question, YES. We have one mold maker employed with me and he provided pics of his work. It is common to get a 16 rms finish on a CNC mill, polishing to 6 rms by hand afterwards, and that was 15 yrs ago.
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One of my 2 concerns for the pot lid was its shape, it is not the quality needed for this use. The defects in form are very visible and the beam reflection is not great. I expected this, but hoped it would be functional and it performed better than expected.
The second concern was light loss from light entering and then exiting thru the glass itself because the mirror surface is on the back of the lid.
One day I will spring for that 12” spotlight reflector for $260.00.
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Wow !! That Moore CNC is a very precision and expensive lathe. I did not know cnc’s could finish machine optical quality and not need a coating to boot !! Thanks for sharing :sunglasses:
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Thanks “MascaratumB”.
This is just the body and mirror after paint. More work than it looks. The hope was long range but we are not there just yet. I am still trying to tune the beam, right now it’s more of a flooder, but I hope to tighten it up more. :+1:
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When corona is over there’ll be a get together at your house right….?? We can enjoy the beautiful view, feast and then shoot down aliens when it gets dark :laughing:
Here we will finish the first build with 1 x XHP70.2 @ 10A 6V.
Battery box from .125 plexyglass.
Bending the plastic was tricky, many mistakes were made and the lessons learned were helpful on the second box.
Mounting bracket.
Forming the driver cooling tube with a heat gun.
The driver is mounted in the handle.
Here is the test at full power at 10 amps 6v. Unfortunately I thought I took some beam pics but not.
This is the end of the first build. After this test it was clear more light was needed.