Looks great. 18650 and smaller (18350, 14500, 16340) are the most popular for EDC. 21700/26650 can be tough to get in a pocket, and 26650 in particular seems to be falling by the wayside.
Are you interested in doing production runs of your light designs - whether they be small runs in the style of the “custom” flashlight market, or large runs shopped out to a manufacturer?
thank you all. the choise of the battery size is of course an important topic. But for me means an EDC light, that you can carry it every day. and you will take a small light more often than i bigger light. That is my experience, thats the reason, why a 18350 size is the best compromise for me. i calculated 1800 Lumens output right now.
as you will see in the parallel thread, i built a lot of 18650 lights. but they are in my oponion too big to carry every day in a pocket.
I’d still like to see a short/thin triple 16340 flashlight w/ tail clicky (forward) switch.
That’s been my quest for a while. Although you are probably more on the “custom” side of the spectrum, I guess you’d have the skills to accomplish that !
Any chance you could do a post or video describing your amazing lathe and CNC setup. I know many people would be interested to spend their money on a lathe but have no idea what makes a good quality machine or what features to look for corresponding to making flashlights.
of course, maybe i can do a workshop tour in a separate thread. But reagarding the lathe - its a very cheap one from chinese production, now 12 years old and costs around 1400€. and i worked a really long time with really cheap tools on it. you can do crazy things on it, but its really time consuming. the more money i spent on high quality tools, the quicker was the time i needed for the parts. but the possibilitys itself stayed the same. so you do not need spend too much money, you need the experience or you have to want get experienced. that is the most important thing. and please forgot the CNC Setup this is a milling machine for wood. no help for the light production itself. i can only build tools out of plastic like shown on it.
but if you are really interessted, i can start a workshop tour.
yesterday i recieved a shipment with the two prototypes. they are now coated with a DLC coating, which looks increadible in real. now i start the endurance test, how resistant that stuff is on Aluminium.