So, I got started messing with stuff yesterday… here’s a few pics and comments.
One very long 1.5” x 1.5” bar of aluminum. Sadly, the wrong length, and since we’re in hand-tool-only land, I have a very sore tricep in exchange for 14 minutes of hacksaw work.
Putting a hole in the end. Glad we could use cordless drills.
1/4-20 threaded insert… I was too lazy (and didn’t have the right size tap) to do otherwise.
Banged in with a bunch of JB Weld at the bottom.
So that short-ish hunk of aluminum will take 5 Nichia emitters and tir-type optics. To hold them in place, I figured some plexiglass on the front would work well. (Otherwise, it’d be a gooey mess of silicone, and that didn’t seem quite right.) I had some crazy box section aluminum that I thought I could cut a couple of bits off of to make a glorified L-bracket. Like so:
I made a fancy miter box so I could once again tire myself out cut nice miters.
Only problem was, it was way too time consuming to try break it apart without destroying the L-bracket that I wanted. I spent some time trying to cut a groove in each bit that needed to come off and then clamping the #$%@ out of it, but that just plain didn’t work.
Back to the metal dealer… you’ll have to visit again to see what transpired.
Update:
Well, the contest is drawing to a close, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t gonna make the cut. However, here’s how it came out.
The earlier idea with the aluminum section really didn’t work, so I found some copper that I figured could work as a spacer between the lexan and the hunk of aluminum.
A little bit of work (okay, a h$%# of a lot!) involved in making nice miters.
Clamped up and ready to cook with the old butane torch.
But wait — what was I thinking? Clamping copper onto a massive heatsink and then trying to sweat it was not going to work. So plan B: do them one at a time.
So with that done, I could enjoy a little hand tapping action in the hunk of aluminum housing the emitters.
Oh carp! Broken hand tap. (And if you’ve ever tried drilling those out, you know that’s a non-starter.) I considered a few options (including giving up entirely and getting drunk), but in the end, flipped the darn thing over and started again.
Done! (The red that you see is silicone baking sheet, smooth both sides, to give me an extra couple of millimeters height.)
Ready to reflow some Nichia 219s onto Nitro’s sinkpads. This was my first time and the contest end was looming, so I was a bit nervous. Thanks to some good advice from here about solder paste, everything went smoothly. (I particularly loved how the emitter would suck itself perfectly into place when everything melted.)
The top one was my first, and you can see I used a little too much paste… the rest turned out nicer.
So, a couple of round bits of plywood for the top and the bottom… I couldn’t find my coping saw, so cut straight and whacked away at them with a chisel for a bit. Very satisfying and slightly time-consuming.
The item formerly known as ‘broken Dewalt charger’ is now chopped up, and its circuit board depopulated.
Top of the charger stuck onto the plywood, which is in turn stuck into the mega aluminum coupler. (Actually, I don’t really know what to call that thing. Maybe just BFAT.) There’s a judco switch stuck on the corner of the charger. The innocent tripod mount has been grafted onto the front of the BFAT, and there’s a magicshine cable for power connection in place. (This allows an extension cable…)
Jump ahead to a whole bunch of soldering being done…
This is direct drive, with 7 parallel 22 ohm, 1 watt resistors draining a bit of power. I could go into the math that I butchered from ohaya (thanks again!), but I’d only embarrass myself.
Oooh, money shot!
More posing!
Lexan on the front still needs trimming, but it wouldn’t be ramshackle if I did everything at once, right?
It lights!
Wall shot from a few feet away. I’ll try and do something late tonight, but wanted to get this all mostly up.
And one last shot. Did I mention that it actually lights up? (You experienced modders get this all the time, but it’s still surprising to me.)
So, many thanks to O-L for this contest. I grumbled, I griped. I cursed having to do metalwork by hand. And I enjoyed every bit of it. (Okay, maybe not the broken hand tap…)
I spent about 30min cutting through a bar a bit thinner than that with a jigsaw and metal blade, I shudder to think how long it would have taken by hand.