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.
Fun project, I wish you the best 
High intensity LED and a big reflector/lens is the most important part.
The bigger your optic is the less it will matter if you use a small size LED.
For anything below 30cm diameter I would recommend the SBT90.2, but if you go bigger then you can find larger LEDs that make more lumens for pretty cheap from china.
Feel free to use these calculators to get some rough estimates of your performance: Advanced calculators for theoretical lumens, lux, beam divergence, and more, of custom LED flashlights
Thanks for the advice. I’ve been following your work for a few years now. Remember the video where you said “maybe this will help someone in the future”? Well… here we are. I chose to start with the Osram due to cost. $15 for the mcpcb & driver from Mountain. Not much to loose if this project doesn’t work out. And the 1mm die size seemed to work well for you when coupled with the 100mm Fasttech lens. I don’t have the advantage of the Wavien, but the flat white does have pretty good performance. If everything goes awesomely well, then I’ll consider upgrading to a larger led.
I totally agree with enderman about the led.
Because you dont have a collar I would suggest getting a smaller lens this one works well and put it close enough to catch the light from the led and direct it to your primary lens. The jig allows me to find the sweet spot for a group of lens before I built the actual light. Collar is best even hand cut
Grin,
I understand the primary+secondary lens strategy. My ADJ PinspotII stage light uses a 20mm half-round primary with a focal length of only a few mm, and a 50mm aspheric secondary with a focal length of about 100mm. So that type of setup is something I may test. I’ve also thought about combining a TIR with the 100mm Fasttech aspheric lens. Likewise, I’ve considered a buying an aluminum flashlight reflector, machining it a bit, and using that as a collar. But I can’t find one that is spherical in profile like the wavien. Everything I’ve seen is parabolic. And unfortunately, I don’t currently have the time or tooling to turn a spherical reflector in my own lathe.
I bought a few more parts for the flood-cooled heat sink yesterday, so that will be the next part of the project. I want to get the mcpcb mounted before I do anything else. I’ll post photos when there’s progress.
I’m also trying to get all of my outdoor home improvement projects finished ASAP. “Smoke season” just started. So far I haven’t had ash fallout like I did last year. But it’s still early in the season. And between that and all of the pollution the city of Denver creates, our air quality is currently nil.
Woohoo! Finally on it’s way.
I didn’t realize the Fasttech website was trying to tell me the lens was back-ordered because the word they used was “Restocking?”. This is the first time I’ve ordered from them. Anyway, over the weekend the order status finally started to change. And this morning I’ve got a photo of the package. I’ve also got some crypto-tracking number that I hope will start meaning something later today. But, at least its on it’s way.
I haven’t made much progress on the heat sink. But last night I did wire a cord to the power supply and plug it in. 3.34vdc on the meter. That’s a good sign.
Stay tuned.
Tonight’s project was to temporarily wire up the driver and led for a quick test. After connecting the driver to the power supply, I measured the output voltage at 3.31vdc. My meter caps out at 200mA, so I couldn’t measure the current output. But I have no reason to doubt that it wasn’t the driver’s rated 3.04 amps. This is a QLite 7135*8 set up for single-mode 100%.
Next, I set up the mcpcb in a “helping hands” fixture and donned my welding helmet. Good thing! When I touched the leads to the mcpcb I nearly arc-flashed myself! That little Osram is BRIGHT! I couldn’t really tell how bright due to the shade-14 lens in my helmet. But looked like a decent TIG arc. The other thing I noticed is how warm the mcpcb got with less than 1 second of runtime. Yesterday I thought maybe liquid cooling was overkill. Heh… not anymore!
The next step is to fabricate the heat sink. That will require some actual machining and bench work. So it’ll maybe happen this weekend?
Ooooh this sounds promising! I haven’t worn my welding helmet in YEEEEARS. #14 is hella dark, I don’t think my electronic welding helmet goes up that high, so that little Osram must be bright as hell. When pics? 
Shade 14 is usually for stick welding. But I run my helmet really dark for TIG because it helps me see the puddle.
Pix maybe by Monday??? Depends on if I have the time and energy. This is my “fun” project. I’ve got three other projects that need to be done before it starts snowing again. And of course, I’m still waiting on that lens.
Hahah I’m glad it’s been helping people out!
Yeah, the white flat does have much better performance per dollar than the SBT, and if you kill it then it’s not a huge deal