making my own trit glow fob

Cool! Is toothpaste abrasive harder than your polymer? If so, you could try that as a polishing compound.

Genius! H) You have an amazing modding talent, Djozz.

Thanks to you all for the kind replies, please post results Chloe, if you try out your heart shaped fob :love:

Polyester resin is in fact already a mix of medium long chains of polyester, adding the hardener causes the chains to cross-link. This cross-linking goes fast in the beginning when it is all fairly liquid, but still continues slowly when the piece is solid. So it keeps getting harder ever so slowly, even after weeks. I did the sanding and polishing after two days (impatient me), so the polishing may go better if I try again sometime after a few weeks. And I do not have the really fine grit sandpaper (just up to 800, the paper rub trick may just work by melting the surface a bit by friction), so getting the right series of sanding paper and doing the polishing right could also improve the result (thanks Chloe for the Micromesh tip, it is not really cheap but looks very good).

You can use Micromesh wet too, in case the melting is affecting the finish.

That would probably help to keep it hard. It is on my wishlist, now wait for the next moment I feel like I can afford spending money on hobby things (instead of food, house, girlfriend, son, beer after volleyball match etc. :-) )

Look for “Barkeeps Best Friend”. It’s a very fine, gentle polish, it works to restore just about any polished surface. I’ve used it on car headlights and glass lenses.

Great work! I think i’ll try your method when i get more vials :wink:

I got a good deal on a few different coloured 3x25mm tritium vials last year and
made some of these simpler keyfobs using 5mm clear tube and resin

I attached them to a bunch of different coloured Thrunite Ti’s and gave them as
little Christmas gifts to some friends & family. Went down really well with the non flashaholics :slight_smile:

Those are also very nice, much nicer than the standard bulky ebay ones. It is a pity that there isn't more variety out there (exept the super-expensive custom made metal trit holders).

This is an interesting site, some of Tofty’s work is on here:

You could design your own holder from different materials.

Thanks for the link, I had not been there before. I had seen some of his flashlights that he posted here, but these other things he makes are just as nice, and not that expensive.

Very good. I like those a lot djozz. Good workmanship. Truly a multi-talented djozz. :slight_smile:

Some nice trit holders there. The spiral one is tempting.

Spiral stainless $11.15 Wish they could do a better finish on stainless. Printed stainless.

The spiral are lovely aren’t they? White/frosted plastic appeal to me the most, but really keychain unfriendly! >.<

Necklace?

Perhaps the first version that used a tube inside would increase the trit’s protection enough for a plastic white/frosted keychain? Can’t find anything on ver 1 tho.

Some pics in another forum.

edit
Ver 1 with an inner tube wasn’t a spiral design… :frowning: I was thinking ver 1 of the spiral.

Very Nice! That work with the polyester resin makes me want to give it a shot. I wonder… :slight_smile:

Very nice, Djozz. I’d like to do something with trits myself sometime.

Update.

After 5 years of hard time on my keychain, the fob looks like this:

It survived well, many bits have chipped off but the trits themselves are not exposed yet. It still looks amazing in the dark.

I had bought a small collection of trits a couple of years ago with good intentions to do something nice with them, but never did that. And trits do fade over time so today I just made them into keyfobs, basically like the the one in the OP, but now with a milky white perspex base, to try something different.

I first did a test pouring some resin on a bit of (partly finely sanded, partly shiny) perspex without trits to see if the adhesion of the polyester onto the perspex was good. It seemed that they formed one piece, but with a chisel and hammer I could split it partly along the transition plane from perspex to polyester, but not where it was sanded.

So I reckoned with some sanding of the perspex it was good enough, and made two fobs using 4 and 2 trits.

Sanding them in shape

And after polishing with subsequently 180, 1000, 3000, 5000, 7000 grit sandpaper and last with some white copier paper. And drilled holes in them.

The polishing is not perfect, I should finish it sometime. It does give an idea of the finished fobs. Now they are finished and I can see the effect of the white layer, I like the original transparent version better, but these are nice too :slight_smile:

There’s at least a slight chance tritium will be dirt cheap in a year or two.

Interesting article, but the restproduct of the process is not tritium but O18 (radioactive oxigen). But in any case, without having much knowledge about that, I would think that the cost of making tritium vials is hardly in the littlebit of tritium used, but in the high-end technology of making the vials.

I never noticed this thread before. Nicely done Jos!