On to cutting, drilling the hard maple cell holder portion. This did not go well the first time. Pictured below is the first block drilled
The cutting down to a smaller width was started….
The bored hole was slightly skewed towards on side. I was concerned about this as drills sometimes do drift in wood. The clearances were tiny, critical. The failed block is pictured to the left. A new maple block has holes drilled and is pictured to the right. This second attempt will be done in two sections, both shorter and should have less cnce of drill bit drift.
I hope.
An additional change is the size of the cell. My original plan was to use 18650 flat or button top cells as I have lots of them. However, I also wanted to use that heatsink which is 20mm wide. That does not leave much extra to work with for an 18650 cell along with some copper tube that the tail cap/plug assembly will be built with. I did not want to use 14500 cells. That is too easy. The cells lower capacity than I wanted. Therefore I bought a 16650 vapcell from illumn.com
I used a section of 17mm OD x 1mm wall copper tube as an alignment tool for the two small block. Then made several small cuts with lots of measuring and careful saw adjustments to slice the maple blocks narrower and shorter.
All the pieces so far, test fitted…
The bored holes are of two sizes. The longer through hole is 17mm. Each block also has a 3/4” deep 19mm hole drilled from one end. The section to the rear of the light will be fitted with a yet to be made removable, bayonet locked, tailplug to provide access for cell changing.
The hole for the 2-56 machine screw was drilled through the switch mount maple strip and into the cell holder block immediately below. (So sorry about he lack of contrast between the work vice surface and the maple blocks.)
The pilot hole in the cell holder block was bored out to accept a press fit threaded spacer sleeve. That was glued in place with thin CA glue. The aluminum spacer surface was roughed with a file corner.
The last image for today has the heat sink, switch plate and cell block secured with a hex head machine screw. A 16650 cell is slipped inside as a fitment test. I am happier today than I was a few days ago.
Happy enough that we are going camping for a couple of days for our 44th anniversary, even though we have rainy weather. We do have a small trailer instead of a tent though.