Oh, I can find a 90cm mirror. Phoenix Electroforms can make me a nice Rhodium-plated one. It’ll cost about $5,000 US. And if I had that kind of budget, I’s just save up a bit and get a Sperry carbon-arc and smoke all ’da fools. The reason you don’t see reflectors bigger than 90-120mm is because holding tolerances at that size is extremely difficult. Enderman used an 11” (about 275mm) Phoenix reflector and it cost him the equivalent of a week at Disneyland. There’s a guy on Ebay selling glass parabolics up to 14.25”, supposedly made by Buffalo Precision Glass. But I can’t find any projects that have ever used one. And $280 for a possibly sketch optic is too rich for me. I know the cheeze-grade 100mm Fasttech aspheric will work b/c Enderman already proved it would. And it’s only $7.63 plus shipping (and maybe 3 months of waiting).
Where would one even start to look to find such a relic? And how much is one of those anyway? Must be worth a pretty penny.
My Nitecore TM39 just came in today. Did a bit of testing around the house/neighborhood but I really need to go somewhere else to test it properly. I will say the SBT-90.2 is one impressive piece of semiconductor. This thing easily lit up an apartment complex that’s ~400m away on low (200 lumens) and absolutely obliterated it with light in turbo, to the point where to my eyes, it all just looked washed out and all I could see was white. Ppl im that building must’ve been thinking there was a chopper looking for someone, although after a while they’d probably realize they never heard it and realized something else was going on. (There’s a chopper that patrols through this area pretty often, but I’ve never seen a searchlight on it). Can’t wait to try this out by El Morro and shine it on the side of a cruise-ship and don’t worry, I won’t aim it at any harbor pilots, lol. There’s a mountain peak close to my house where I can even see the sealine, the airport, El Morro and all of that, might go by there tomorrow night and hope it’s not full of cops like always. They just loooove killing people’s buzz up there.
The buffalo glass mirrors are very good quality and the easiest way to get the effect you are looking for. The HID is cheap and doesnt need so much cooling.
Is there any thread you could point me to of a how to of someone building a really high power spotlight? I don’t care about efficiency or size, I’d just love to build something that can be seen from miles and miles away and can throw a very defined beam at the clouds miles up in the air. Preferably something that’s relatively affordable to build too, under a thousand dollars and even better if it didn’t total more than $500. I just wanna obliterate the clouds and have a “batman signaler” type of beam. I’ve always wanted one of those since I was a kid.
Go read grin’s threads.
A royal blue LED is going to be more visible in the air than white. More efficient also.
Endermann did a bunch of those. Nice reflex lights with water-cooling, you could take out the Death Star with one of those.
Well, maybe.
Please do it and take out that Death Star—that thang has been such a pain in my arse.
Same here. Always blowing up my favorite planets…
Neurotoxin:
Search on this forum and/or YouTube for Lightcanon (one ‘n’, misispelled by Enderman on purpose) and “Optafire”. Those are Enderman’s large aspheric projects. Basically, they’re what I’m trying to replicate.
As for carbon arcs, Bob's Searchlight Page
Thanks for the update. Is this your project?
FYI: I promised my professional lighting engineer relatives (who design very large lighting systems for stadiums, high bays, etc) and that I wouldn’t try short-arc HIDs. I was cautioned that miscalculating the optics, or using a sketchy reflector, could reflect light back into the lamp. And that would cause it to explode and shower a 10-ft area with 1,000-3,000 degree shrapnel traveling at Mach 6. According to them, it’s already happened more than once and has killed at least one person. LEDs may be low power compared to an Osram short-arc. But a white flat probably wont try to kill me and burn my house down if I look at it wrong.
No worries, I have many lights half built, I have also experimented with different reflectors/mirrors and lens.
One thing I will say about both and is something to think about.
A short focal length will give you a fatter beam and more lumens.
A long focal length will give you a narrower beam with less lumens.
This can be demonstrated with a jig I made, the lens dont really matter for what I am trying to explain. But they are spherical from edmunds optics primary 150mm dia 600mmFL, secondary is 100mm dia 100mm focal length.
Thank you, will do, likely tomorrow as it’s late and was just getting on the laptop very quickly to upload a pic in another thread and go back to Netflix. Looking forward to seeing more progress from your project!
And Jesus Christ, those carbon arcs sure are worth a pretty penny!
New parts have arrived! (most of them)
Spotlight project:
3.3vdc, 40 amp CC power inverter/supply
Osram CSLNM1.TG
3.1 amp driver
Arctic Silver 5
old penny (for size reference)
Still no word from Fasttech regarding the lens, except that “expected delivery” is tomorrow. Considering that’s in communist-years, actual delivery may be later. We shall see.
Halloween/Christmas display:
12vdc, 29 amp CC power inverter/supply
Ray Wu’s Store (on Aliexpress) “10-watt” dumb RGB floodlights, IP-66 rated
Light-O-Rama CMB-24 controller (already had that, included for reference)
Yesss, parts are getting here… hopefully the remainder arrive in a timely manner. 
The 12v rgb flooders are up and running. I ran them through the basic “hardware test utility” for about an hour.
Flash flood warning:
I’ll probably start testing the spotlight this weekend.
Still no word from Fasttech, but I doubt they’ve even shipped my lens. Looks like that’s going to be the McGuffin.
Isn’t this just a typical aspheric lens setup in yer typical zoomie when ya zoom-in and zoom-out? I mean no special demonstration jig necessary, right? :laughing: :student:
Intriguing project and great results so far. Subscribed! 
Pretty colors! Hopefully that lens gets a move on. I had A BUNCH of orders that I had placed about a month ago, and I thought they’d never get here but I received several packages yesterday and got two more packages today. All were mailed in 2nd day air. I really, really don’t understand what’s going on with sellers. They could have just been faster to mail my stuff with cheap shipping instead of waiting till the last minute and having to pay for 2nd day air to meet the deadline.
Still no real news on the lens. Fasttech’s site now says “Expected ship date” is 8/12. But as we’ve seen, that’s in communist-days. So… maybe I’ll get it by Christmas??? I think one of the reasons shipping is so slow is because the front office/sales dept/marketing wanks don’t know or care what’s actually in the warehouse. And the poor warehouse schlubs get tons of orders they can’t fill because the warehouse is jammed with inventory nobody wants, but is completely out of what people did order. So they have to sit on the tickets until a shipment of XXX comes in. Then they have to work like mad and air-mail everything out because management wants to know why those orders haven’t shipped and insists they go TODAY. Of course, mgt will never admit that their darling salesforce/marketing wanks could be wrong, so… yeah. I worked for “that company” several times in my career.
S’ok. I haven’t even started soldering yet. And I still need to work out a final design for the heat sink. I really like the liquid cooling rig CNCMan built for his “pot lid” light. But I want to be able to swap leds. So I’m working on a mechanical hold-down clamp design instead of using thermal epoxy. I already have a pump that I think will work. I salvaged it from my old dishwasher a few years ago. It’s 120vac, but that’s not a problem for this project. Unfortunately though, my time is rather limited. I’m rebuilding my backyard deck and that is sucking up most of my energy. It’s got to be done by Oct 1 due to the Colorado climate. And I’ve got a ton of other projects waiting behind it.