Something to design the steampunk flashlight on?
That is sweet.
Is there any more info on this flashlight?
This reminds me of an OL light creation.
My steampunk machine… any guesses at to what it is? It does have non-budget lightbulbs in it…
Enigma machine! :Sp
Close, but no banana…
Enema machine?
definitely a cool looking light !
:bigsmile:
awsome job on that Rufusdbuck 
i remember reading your build on the gun-light.
I like the brass mesh idea. They really did a nice job turning a cheap flashlight into a light saber. Not to bad in the Lady Vader suit either.
I was hoping it would have a green cree in it. :Sp
A good alternative to coal would be lard oil. When preheated, it burns in an Argand lamp like whale oil. Rapeseed oil from wild cabbage was also supposed to work well in lighthouses.
Maybe a coal or oil powered light could use a Peltier thermoelectric diode instead of a steam turbine or piston steam engine. Easier to do on a small scale, and turbines don’t actually scale well to small size and power. I don’t see in Wikipedia about their being used to generate electricity, but they are efficient enough that they must be reversible.
There was a post around here on a girl who used a peltier to power a few 5mm leds using the differential of hand heat and a cool metal pipe.
The problem with peltiers is they need a differential of heat to operate. The bigger the differential the more the electricity. (the opposite is true also, just with temperature), meaning that your flashlight would have to have excellent heatsinking in order to maintain that very high differential. And peltiers are inefficient at generating electricity, so it would be a very low drive current.
Sorry to shoot you down. I love the concept, but we don’t have (to my knowledge) the technology to efficiently convert chemical energy to heat to electricity to light.
As a side note, peltiers are more efficient at generating heat than cooling somthing, there was a post either here or on cpf of “the freezerator”, a –200+ degree freezer powered by pelters, and heatsunk with a garden hose. If I remember right, it was exponential how much water was needed to cool the pelters vs how cold the freezer was to get.
Yes, I think one would have to give up the idea of it being a useful flashlight, which I don’t think is the usual steam punk approach. One could really go 19th Century and use an Argand lamp, a more than half spherical reflector (aluminised Mylar pasted on the inside of a ball) to catch the backwards light and a plastic Fresnel lens.
I saw kerosine Argand lamps on a farm in Norway. They had much less bulge in the chimney around the flame than the flat wicked lamps did. Apparently, with whale, lard or vegetable oil, the ends of the wick smoke. So Argand got rid of the ends by wrapping it in a circle.
I have one of these - brass with a leather strap. It’s sort of steampunk. At least in the materials used.
Well, it sort of looks like an enigma machine. Probably some sort of encryption device?