Photon Fanatic Build, Ti Neck Light (Pic Heavy) *8-5-14 Upgrade*

Here’s a bonus, the last of the Ti bar. Fred made a pill fob for my wife by my request in order to use the rest of the 1” bar. This series of pictures you can thank MRsDNF for, enjoy!

[Thud!]

That was the sound of my jaw hitting the floor.

It took 100+ pictures to make those 7! That collage is actually 16x24 at 300dpi, click it and go to Flicker to see it full size. :wink:

Laugh out loud Wayne! Thanks! Now my kid will never get to sleep! “What’s so funny Dad? So what’s so funny?”

No I did not make this or take the pictures. I just inquired about it.

Thanks for nothing DBCstm. I will no longer post any pictures of any machining I do. I'm just not worthy.

I’ve seen your work man, post em up! That little scope looking mini is awesome, send it to me and I’ll take some pics for you. :wink:

I tried to show the little pill fob against common objects so’s you could get a sense of it’s size. My mojo was off but I’m happy with a couple of these, especially the ones in front of the P-60 and in my wife’s hand.

Glad you like em.

Bottom’s up!

Wow!! :open_mouth: Incredible work. Thanks for sharing!

It looks fantastic. Thank you for the many pictures. I haven’t the equipment or the ability to do such a great work. For me it’s really nice to see, how such a great product was produced.

I’m a photographer. Can’t help myself. So, with that being said, here’s a new shot I just took for a size comparison evaluation. This picture is a stacked macro comprised of 62 individual shots merged together to get this one highly detailed picture. Nothing spectacular about the Solarforce L2P used here other than the Gold color. But, the AAA MiniMag recently acquired from O-L is a very cool little light! I hope to chop it to a single AAA and with that in mind started taking some measurements. That’s when I realized that in chopped form it will be almost exactly the size of the Texas Poker shown above! The chopped AAA MiniMag in this photo is not actually chopped….I took the liberty to Photoshop it to show the result if I’m able to pull it off. Go ahead, look at it full size in Flickr and see if you can find the “seam” lol

Thought I’d give y’all a look behind the scenes, as it were. Fred uses Solid Works to design the product, then machines it exactly like the design. I’ve never seen autocad type work before and find it amazing that someone can design something on this level, then replicate the design on a manual lathe. It equates to sheer Genius as far as I’m concerned!

Fred even sent me a file with this information to be used in a Solid Works Viewer so that I could look through the components, rotate it around 360º and get a good feeling for the light from inside to out. Mind boggling stuff it is! I took the above picture as a screenshot from this viewer while looking at a 3D cutaway view of the Texas Poker on an angle. The copper pill inside the copper heatsink shows that a good portion of the head is copper with the weight of that copper being pretty central in the overall balance scheme. Very nice! :slight_smile:

My 5 year old, in the background, just asked the question “What do you call a flying skunk?”

Drumroll

A Smellicopter! :slight_smile:

that is stunning!!! :open_mouth: congrats!!

this is pure pr0n :heart_eyes:

Wish it were here already. lol The driver is being programmed in Germany, shouldn’t be much longer. (fingers crossed on the lucky rabbits foot while wishing on a 4 leaf clover)

Well, the driver is on the way from Germany so Fred should have drivers to put in the Texas Poker within a week, should be getting the light within a couple of weeks. Wonder if I should take pictures of it with beamshots when it gets here? :slight_smile:

Yes you should. No really, you should!

This is an amazing light through and through. Thank you for sharing it with us :-)

Bad news first? The PICcolo driver has failed muster. The prototypes made it back to Australia and there is an issue with the voltage regulation. Somehow the light will blink on hi regardless of what mode is coming on before it goes to the proper setting. So if you have mode memory set at Lo, the light will blink on hi first then go to lo. Not acceptable. I might could learn to live with that, but Matt hates it and is regrouping. And in truth, I’d like lo to be my default so the Hi blinkies would definately be a distraction.

So the Texas Poker will be getting a miniFluPic driver that doesn’t put out nearly the power. On the bright side I’ll have longer run times, on the fugly side all the searching for the highest output XP-G S2 or High Output Nichia 219 was for naught. Even the Efest IMR 10440’s are now overkill.

In truth, the light will probably be much more useable this way. But it won’t have bam! factor, we’ll see. But it would appear that I’ll now be lucky to pull 200 lumens where I was looking for something just over 300 with the PICcolo driver. 200 lumens in a pinky finger sized light is still a lot of lumens, no doubt! And this will also keep heat from being a major player in the life of my LED.

Perhaps Matt will get it worked out and I can make a swap down the road. Might even upgrade to an XP-G2 at that time, only time will tell.

And that’s part of the good news, cause now it won’t be much longer and I’ll have my Ti neck light! :slight_smile:

What incredible craftsmanship. I stare as the pictures in this thread in awe.

dood……………

This is amazing. Threads like this are my favorite, even though I don’t mod.

Sorry to hear your luck with the driver. Hope it all gets sorted without too much trouble.

For what it’s worth, I would go with a nichia219, but that’s me. Either way, this is one badass little light.

Nichia 219 it is! This is the 5000K variant at 475 lumens @ 1.5A, not the much lower output 4500K 92 CRI version. I have one on a SinkPAD copper star sitting beside me, thermally pasted to a copper bar 16” long, 1” wide, and 1/4” thick. Direct connected to a Lifepo4 with 3.35V it pulled 1.28A at the emitter and gives a nice white light, surprisingly bright! So this will be a good thing! :slight_smile:

The Dereelight reflector got mated to the copper heatsink today, mini FLuPIC should be installed shortly. I sent one of my Efest IMR10440 cells to test it with as that’s what I’ll be using in the light. That should be there Friday.

Getting close! :slight_smile: