Yippee ki-yay!! That is totally amazing! I totally understand why you'd love to see this bad boy stretch it's legs out in the open country on a moonless night with low humidity and no wind. You'd hit 2 miles is my guess.
That last pic with the tower is mind blowing bright. I loooove it! Now we just have to get you a 10" aspheric lens, one of those 15000 lumens bridgelux arrays Texaspyro talks about, the fan from one of those swamp boats and a 3 kW generator set and about 5 pounds of aluminium heat sink. Then let you have at it!
Seriously though that is a awesome build you've completed. Thank you for sharing this. It is really food for thought!
Nope, but I waited till I saw no helicopters in sight, before I lit up that thing. Don't want some officer with a real serious spotlight lighting up my world.
The N bin I used will do 850-1,000lm at 3.15A. I don't know what it would do at 6A, but now it should be back to it's max, with the solder joint fixed. Possibly it would be hard to read lux due to the light being concentrated thru the aspheric lens? I don't know.
I did the measurement with the head off in my integrating box… I don’t have the sphere set up yet. It does tend to over-estimate lumens at high levels. I suspect it is actually something somewhat over 2000 lumens.
Hmm… I don’t know about the 3000 lumens things, really, but I am not gonna deny it though since I do not have proof.
First of all, I do not deny that this thing is BRIGHT and has Serious Throw, but still have some doubts. As claimed by Old Lumens, this thing can throw up to about 1.376 miles, which can be rounded as about 2.2km, or 2200 meters.
Assume that we define the throw distance by ANSI standard, to only 0.25 lux.
Then the lux at 1m should be (2200/2)^2 = 1,210,000 lux @1m! In other word, 1.21 million candlepower!
As far as I know the legendary DEFT created by saabluster (Michael) has “only” 700k cp. And this is done with overdriven XR-E with 101mm aspherical lens.
From what I have read, an “N” bin SST-90 can produce from 2,500 to 3,000 lumens at 9 amps. I’m only from reading other threads in other forums.
As far as the 1.376 miles, well there's the photos and there's the google map stating the distance. I don't know what that means for people needing numbers for proof, but for me, it was good enough to see with my eyes, that the building, (the whole dammed building), was lit up at that distance. I don't know if possibly the numbers don't show reality or what. I've seen things that defy the numbers many times in my life and to me seeing is believing. I usually trust what I see, more than what numbers tell me, but I know, for a lot of people, numbers are the only real thing out there and I am not knocking that. I know that numbers and calculations are needed for people to be able to understand or verify that what they see is real, but since I don't have a IS, I can't give anyone those numbers and I think it would take a big IS and a very good metering system to verify 3,000 lumens, not the little 12" spheres & inexpensive meters, that many people have.
I guess what I am trying to say is, I don't think there is a way to verify satisfactorily, at this time.
at the end of the day, as long as a light (or whatever) does what you want it to do, the numbers are largely irrelevant. I prefer subjective labels such as low/mid/high or, for my bike lights, dim/bright/damn bright.
Old-Lumens, you are a great modder and willing to share your knowledge with us. I have seen your youtube videos and they are very helpful to me and I believe to anyone else, so I definitely have no doubt with your modding skill and your flashlight. It was simply out of curiosity that I asked about the lux reading, but no mean of any disrespect at all.
Maybe it’s my bad english expression that cause some misunderstanding here. Yes, it is a bada thrower exactly!
