Plumbers Fins/ Some beam shots by DBCstm added to end of thread

Alternatives. That all I’m looking for.

Stunning pics.

Appreciate it. The light is gorgeous, it was fun shooting it! :wink:

There ya go RBD, as an alternative you could disassemble MRsDNFs lathe and modify it into a shop light utilizing MT-G2 emitters and copper heat sinks. :wink: Since he’s not using the lathe, the light would help him finish that legendary picnic table he’s been working on for 12 years now! Then he can throw a big Bar-B-Que and we’d all be invited! Yeah baby!

Heaven forbid, :open_mouth: I think I would rather see that lathe get any tuning, repairs, or new parts needed so that it’s ready for the next round of Moose Mods. It’s been the birthplace of enough lights to deserve a shrine if nothing else. I’m itching alll over to see what gets done by all the creative and resourceful people that are willing to throw down in the upcoming contest. It should be great.

That light’s no good. It has a piece of lint on it. Send me the light and I will dispose of it properly… :party:

It helps me test wind direction so I can aim the light properly! It’s my own addition to this mod, I might have a couple more twists too, like gluing a magnet to the tail so I can attach it to the roof of my truck to read maps. Then it would also attach to the D ring on Shadow’s collar so he can carry the light when we go walking. Dang things so heavy with a 10440 cell in it!

No need, just replace that normal copper tailcap with some of that Chinese magnetic copper. A local store got in some reels of 100% pure copper wire made in China. Magnets stuck to it really well. The US is soooo far behind in the fine arts of bogophysics, we can’t possibly catch up to the Chinese. And our LED lights get less than 1/3 the lumens out of the same LEDs as the Chinese.

Maybe I can pay them with the Gold Coin chocodollars my son has, get me some of that good copper and plenty of 10000 lumen emitters!

So I’m calling it the BBC 261L for posterity! :slight_smile:
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Just wondering if you’ve tested any MagLites in your Sphere? I got my dad the “new” 2D LED MagLite (I did make sure it had the Cree emitter) to replace his old incan (horrible creature!) and it’s rated at 134 lumens. Kind of difficult to wrap the brain around this little jewel, the BBC 261L, blowing the doors off a full sized factory LED MagLite! Guess I can do a ceiling bounce comparison and see how the room lights up, always a fair test for comparison purposes even if it comes with no numbers.

Not being able to wait for dark to settle in again, I went ahead with some shots in a semi-dark 20x20 game room. The contender…my dad’s 2D LED MagLite with Cree emitter. In this first couple, the camera was on auto and 15 feet from the fireplace. The 2D got 1600ISO at 1/13th sec f/2.8 while the BBC got 800ISO at 1/20th sec f/2.8. The other 2 shots are in manual, both using the same settings of 100ISO 1/5th sec f/2.8 and 12 feet from the book case.

2D Mag

BBC 261L

2D Mag w 1.9x teleconverter

BBC 261L w 1.9x teleconverter

All shots straight out of the camera jpegs from the Canon G1X

Yes, with fresh batteries it turns on at 155 lumens. At 2 minutes it’s down to 135 lumens. After 4 minutes it begins to level off around 125 lumens.

So Mags listed numbers are pretty much spot on. And this little light does a great job of kicking it’s big brothers booty! lol Yeah yeah, runtimes notwithstanding. :stuck_out_tongue:

Decided to put the BBC 261L up against it’s sibling, the Texas Poker. Almost exactly the same size, but thoroughly different…it’s an apples to oranges comparison. The Texas Poker has a mini-FluPIC driver and is pulling .700mA through it’s Nichia 219 5000K emitter, delivered via a Dereelight reflector. The BBC 261L is utilizing a custom made RBD driver pulling 1.11A through an XP-G2 emitter, delivered via a Ledil Tina2-D TIR Optic.

The target, our trailer shed…30 yds distant. The camera, Canon G1X in Manual mode set at ISO 2000 F/3.2 1/5th second. Settings derived by matching what my eyes were seeing.

The Texas Poker

The BBC 261L

The Texas Poker has some throw to it, with a decent aura of spill. The BBC 261L is BOOM! All light, smoothly delivered! 30 yds illumination from a 3 1/4” flashlight, oh yeah, gotta love THAT! :slight_smile:

One reminder — emissivity: Surface Emissivity Coefficients

shiny metal is way worse at radiating away heat compared to rough or tarnished or anodized metal, generally.

Illustration: how hot a shiny metal tool gets after a while in sunshine, compared to anything else.

Is the sun shining on that tool from the INSIDE? Does the shiny surface stop the heat from coming OUT.

I’m really not trying to argue, but it seems to me these are two totaly different things. Radiant heat from the sun shining on a shiny tool might indeed bounce off. But passive heat from contact is not the same thing, is it? In other words, the dark rusty wrench and the shiny chromed new on will both pull heat off the stove top when in contact with it by transferrence, they might not dissipate it as fas as the rusty one has more surface area.

Just trying to understand. Putting a torch on one side of a shiny copper penny with the other side on your finger, vs the same scenario with a dark brown corroded penny, I doubt anyone would be able to measure the difference in time it took you to drop either penny.

I’m probably totally wrong, but have handled enough metal items in the Texas sun to be entirely off base… picking up a rusty piece of metal off of 170º asphalt is essentially the same as picking up a chromed piece of metal lying beside it. I have never measured the temperature of those 2 pieces, but as they were both lying on 170º asphalt I would venture a guess that both are the same 170º by virtue of their contact with the asphalt. Without that direct contact, then yes, it’s a different story.

A shiny surface will tend to be smoother and have less surface area than a dull, rough, pitted, or anodized surface. The copper looks cooler shiny though.

I think that thermal transfer from one metal to another is best with closely matched smooth surfaces(good threading counts as closely matched and increases surface contact area) whereas emissivity to air requires maximizing surface area( and this can go down to the molecular level) and that is what argues against shiny vs dull. As you say though, I’m not sure either how much to take this into account at the heat range and delta T we are operating in.

Ambient temperature is far more important. If the air is too hot to pull the heat off the light, it doesn’t matter much if the light has the perfect surface finish. Likewise, if the air is cool enough to greedily lap the heat from the light, it will do so with any surface.

I counted on my hot rods to warm my hands when out playing with lights at the lake here with manxbuggy1 and rdrfronty. But at 41º with a stiff breeze, none of the lights would warm our hands! Not even my M8 with MT-G2 at 12A.

This is why I can’t see how it really matters, there seem to be greater factors at play than the actual surface finish so for me it’s a waste of my mental energies trying to measure the marginal. Besides, I like my Cu and Ti SHINY! :slight_smile:

Shiny copper fins are beautiful and it works fine as is, for sure. I’m a big fan of the ray-gun style, never understood why we don’t see more lights designed like that. The emissivity thing is just one of those fun physics facts that make a little difference sometimes, worth knowing about becaues they’re kind of counterintuitive.

PS on the soldering — did you use regular solder?
or did you braze the piece? (“brazing” or “hard soldering” is getting it just up to red hot, with mostly silver brazing material and flux)?

I ask because I’ve done various outdoor copper and brass pieces with silver brazing — dropping them directly into boiling water as soon as the metal’s solid — which blasts the flux off the metal very cleanly, and they don’t corrode. By contrast the same metals soldered with ordinary electrical or non-electrical solder seemed very hard to get clean, and corrosion always seemed more likely.

That one I soldered. I’ve done more brazing since then and improved a bit but it’s tricky and requires perfectly clean parts. I’ll continue to use both as I see fit.

Edit- I also do the boiling trick.