DIY contest. Beam shots in the op

And since naming is all the rage, how about Nemo? Since it looks like it belongs on the Nautilus. He was clever, powerful, and a little bit bad.

Driver didn’t work. I have a plan b so I should still finish. 6/20
Success with plan b. Beam shots tonight. :bigsmile:

For anyone curious, it weighed in at 3/4 lb or ~ 340-350g w/2 unprotected cells.

I’ll finish up the build pics here. This is the mtg pill ready to load.

Dale, you were wondering how the cells load. Like this, first one goes in positive first. The spring compresses and the cell slips past the switch.

Then the second just drops in.

Screw in the pill and see if it works. Low, then high.

And again with the head attached.

Wall shots on pastel green wall. Low, then high next to 502B w/7C XM-L2. The cell phone camera does quite a bit of self correcting so light intensity isn’t very accurate but these do give a general idea of beam profile. The outdoor shots show intensity better.

Moving outdoors. 60 yds to garage door. Ambient.

High, XM-L2

High MT-G2

Zoomed XM-L2

Zoomed MT-G2

For comparison. This is the same reflector with an XP-G2(last years ray gun) at about 30 yds.

This is the belt clip and phone case. You can make out the notches in the disc and the matching ridge in the clip that provide the rotational detents.

Here is the light on the belt clip. I made the post a bit long to give the head more clearance from me and the clip. My apologies for the finger.

To do list:
Make secret part and install
Install switch parts
Test and install driver
Install spring plate
Fire it up
Make notches in the disc for the detents. Probably won’t get this done any time soon.

Brass parts count(brass only, does not include anything else (also copper bits for pills)): 65. 6/19

By popular demand(one is enough, right ?) here’s a sketch.

Contest entry, I’ll be sticking links here to the posts that have new stuff. I think I have all the parts, we’ll see if I have whatever else I need.

Here’s some of the parts. The big one is a brass bath tub drain.

It’s going to be a 2 x 18650 dive light, maybe with 2 pills, mtg and XML. I have a short trip to the Channel Islands end of May. If it floods, I’ll join Steve as a MRrDNF.

Reserved for tantrums.

Spent 4 hours turning a 4” x 1 1/2” brass tube into a 2 x 18650 oval only to find out the brass was flawed by pits. Good practice for the real one. :expressionless:

Fed up with trying to post this with a stupid small keyboard qwerty postage stamp. Later.

Just so you know not everything goes to plan. This part

Was not supposed to end up welded to the base. I was able to salvage the part by grinding it free but needless to say it involved a few choice phrases. :expressionless:

Fancy fluorescent tube in my magnifying lamp died(might have had something to do with being dropped) I’m half blind now.

Lamp couldn’t fly so I tried it out as a nail.

Driver failed. Not surprising given how poor the work on it was. Going to use an already finished 3A 105C with the same regulator mod but without the lvp mod.

4/27

Still not sure how I want to do the rest of the head but it begins with the pill and the connection between the head and the tube. To make this connection I’ll use a 1/2” compression union soldering 1 cap to the head and one to the body with the driver and led going into the union(or some part of it).

As is a 1/2” copper pipe fits this but it’s heavy and the wall thickness is ~2.4 mm. Also, there is a pipe stop in the middle so I’m going to ream it out so that coupler fits instead.

I quickly bored this out with a hole saw.

Ugly, I know, but after spending 3 hours reaming it out with 200w/d wrapped around a 1/2” bolt chucked into a hand drill it looked much better. The last few passes where lubricated with water.

The cap on the right is stock and union and cap on the left now fit the coupler dimension. Wall thickness of the union has been reduced by ~1mm and the coupler is now a better fit than the pipe was.

5/1

More grinding. With the same bolt I used to ream out the inside of the union I cobbled together a means to turn down the outside of one of the union caps. Here it is with most of the corners already ground off with the Dremel.

Then I put this thingamajig into the drill press and started spinning it down with 200 w/d.

I kept on with this until all the flats and tool marks were gone.

At this point I removed it from the jig to check wall thickness and find out what I wanted for a final OD. It measured 23.9 mm so I decided to stop around 23mm. I rechucked it and sanded some more, sometimes with a strip of paper backed by a file, sometimes backed with a finger, and finishing with single passes with the file to true it up. Here it is end to end with another cap showing how much was removed.

Short stint in the shop and other chores to do now. Hopefully more this weekend.

05/02

I crammed in a bit more. Cut the cap with a diamond Dremel blade (makes a very thin cut and lasts awhile).

And here are the two pieces back on the other part which will become the pill(2 pills , actually).

05/04

This part covers how the top gets put together. It will be like the bottom plate with a locater/backing plate but is complicated by the threaded hole for the batteries and pill. I started with this piece.

Then roughed out where the hole will be and scribed the cut for the other end.

Since there will be multiple brazing operations and I can’t afford for this piece to float like the other end I drilled it for 2 brass pegs. I drilled the inner plate first then clamped both layers in the vise and finished through both.

The “pegs” were cut from a brass screw eye I will use for the lanyard ring on the bottom.

Plenty of flux.

After cleaning it up I drilled some locator holes and wired 1/2 of the threaded union cap I’d made earlier to it and added more flux.

I stopped taking pictures for a bit but here it is brazed onto the tube with the excess filed off.

Next is some work on the switch which belongs in the Brass in the middle section.

5/13

Started working on the head by cutting up this tub drain. Edit- I used the tube and the ring it threads into.

Then had to backtrack and file the threads off the reflector for it to fit in the tube.

Here is the tube with ~35mm cut off. I won’t be using that much but need the extra to put it together with the next piece.

I found a compression fitting that is just a little loose in the tube so I brazed a brass plate to one end and trimmed that to fit the tube. I’ll cut/grind the flats round and cut out most of the middle of the plate after it’s brazed into the tube. Here it is after brazing the plate and snipping the excess.

And after filing to fit the tube. The part of the tube below the plate will be cut away after brazing so that the outside steps down in diameter as the reflector gets smaller. A ring will be added above the plate for the reflector to rest on and take the pressure of the lens instead of the led substrate.

The various pieces of the head step down in diameter so each one gets located a specific distance from the lens. Most of the plate on that last piece gest cut out to allow the reflector to fit through. That part is the second step with the tube being the first and this next part the third. Here it is after rough boring.

And after reaming it a bit. The other half of the cap that I turned smooth and cut is a slip fit into this piece. When I’m done hacking away at this part the two will be brazed together and fins soldered onto the outside.

And here it is again after removing the corners with a hacksaw and some grinding.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense now. It probably won’t make any more sense later.

5/16

Got enough done on the head that it’s starting to look like something but I changed the way I set it up for brazing. First I cut the center out of the plate/step and trimmed the tube back leaving –3mm extra.

I want exactly 14mm from the step to the threaded end of the tube so I cut 14mm from the recent off cut and resized it so that a 12g wire separated the two tubes. The shallow kirf keeps the wire in place.

Here it is partway in.

G

And pressed in the rest of the way and flipped over. If this works right the step will be just right and the shim won’t get stuck.

Loaded with flux and awaiting six bits of brazing wire.

Whoopee, it worked!

Trial assembly.

Now to trim the excess from the tube and start grinding.

A bit more.

Here it is with the top section and bezel ground and sanded. My spinning bolt is a long 1/2” carriage bolt with the head cut off and chucked into my cheapo drill press.

Then I removed the top section, reversed the bottom and worked it over.

Not done yet but starting to look like something.

Plenty of work left to do on this sanding the small end smooth, adding a plate to the bezel, along with some stops on the inside and fins on the outside. The only brazing left to be done here is the bezel. The rest of the head is just soldered. Not sure what I’ll work on next.

5/20

Decided to work on the bezel as the hole that later gets enlarged leaving just a lip starts out small enough to help stabilize the head when I spin it to smooth the fins.

I started by brazing a plate to the bezel ring which began as part of the tub drain. Edit- I was able to flip this ring and liked how it looked with the lip toward the front much more.

And after preliminary trimming and cleanup. Dumping the hot part in boiling water loosens the brazing flux which hardens to a scale that’s hard to remove otherwise.

Next to mark the center measuring from the inside. This part was cast not machined so it’s unlikely that inside and outside diameters are concentric.

I started out using a 3/8 bolt to spin it and I will definitely have to true it up by hand before it’s finished as the sidewalls of the bezel ring are not a consistent thickness but even so it’s coming along.

I also did some work on the pills using the bored out threaded coupler from earlier.

I cut open a piece of 1” pipe, annealed and flattened it for some discs.

And cut some 1/2” pipe and coupler pieces along with the discs.

These parts were brazed and cleaned up.

One of them didn’t turn out too well. I don’t care about the off center plate as that gets trimmed but then inner tube didn’t end up in contact with the inner plate.

That was a fail so I cut some new parts and did it again but slightly differently.

The two plates on this part were recessed using two stacked brass washers as shims. With just a little filing, a 16mm sink pad fits nicely and self centers.

That wouldn’t work well on the MT-G star so I’ll have to do something different to center that one. First I notched the sides partway for the wires.

Then I made a jig from two pieces of aluminum pipe and a strip from a soda can. The strip and tubes are snug to the copper pipe and the 20mm just slips in.

Then it was simple solder them. I used flux to coat the surfaces and cut a short piece of solder to go under each pad and heated them with a small torch. When the solder melted I pushed down on the stars to squeeze out the excess.

The last soldering operation before the LEDs get reflowed is the threaded collars but I have to file down the Noctogon first and determine exactly where to solder the collars so the LEDs end up the same. The XML get a spacer disc but the mtg only gets some kapton on the substrate. There are a bunch of different parts coming together now but still a ways to go. It may not get done in time for this years trip which is now only a week away. Oh well, I’d rather take a good piece next year than junk now.

6/4

Did some more brazing practicing on thin brass for a difficult piece coming up later. This was 25mm wide .4mm thick brass flat stock that I annealed and bent into a tube. Rolling it sandwiched between two pipes( inside one and outside the other) makes it nice and round. Getting the seam so it’s flush without pressure helps to keep it from getting wonky when heating it.

A bit of cleaning and sanding ( a lot, actually) and it’s a nice snug fit. This piece will be cut to form spacer rings between the brass fins on the larger middle section of the head. Can you see the seam? It’s right there starting at the tiny nick on the right.

And a second smaller tube from the same stock. Note the tiny notch where it didn’t fill.

One more showing where it goes. See that notch again?

I did some other work on some driver bits but that post will have to wait until I can finish and test the results.

6/09

Spent a good deal of time cutting fins and spacer rings since last night. First a 1” hole saw.

Then a 1 3/4” hole saw.

I made 5 of these. For the larger end of the head I was able to nest a 1 1/4” hole saw with the 1 3/4” hole saw. These are a loose fit but since they are mostly cosmetic on this part of the head I don’t care. The first 5 didn’t quite fit so I wrapped tape and sandpaper around a 7/8” hole saw and reamed them to fit.

It didn’t look like much but took about 2 hours of sanding before they fit.

Next I needed to cut the spacer rings from the tubes I had made earlier. I used a Dremel wheel in the drill press to do this, slipping a bit of copper into the kirf once I had gone half way around. I cut the rings just under 3mm and sanded them to fit. After each cut I dressed the remaining tube with sand paper on my work ply.

At the step between the 2 sizes I added a second ring layer cut, resized, and brazed from some round brass tube.

Here they are after a rough clean up.

And again stacked up on the head.

I’ll need to solder them on and grind much of them off giving the head it’s final shape. Once that’s done I’ll enlarge the bezel opening to match the reflector and the head minus the LEDs will be done.

6/12

I soldered up the head this evening.

Then taped over the threads to protect them and put it back on the bolt to spin it in the drill press. I put some red magic marker on the edge so I could tell when they were all even.

A couple hours later it looked like this.

And mounted on the tube.

Next I get to open up the bezel.

6/14

Finished up the bezel using a 1 1/8” hole saw and reaming it out to 33mm(reflector opening id) using the same technique I used on the fins. The lens has a paper coating on both sides that I left on a bit longer.

I finally took the plunge and reflowed my led from an aluminum star onto the copper pill w/brass threads. The extra brass bit on the bottom holds the driver and fills the gap between the pill and B+.

The o-ring in the middle rests against a stop( the other half of the threaded piece brazed to the top of the battery tube) and is a snug fit(needs silicon grease to slip in easily). It is stretched over the pill and completely fills the gap to the outside as well.

Here it is threaded into the head.

When also threaded to the body the o-ring is further compressed against all surfaces.

I’m more confident of this being proof against leaks than I am about the switch working properly but time will tell.

Once the led was in place I pulled the coating off the lens so I could see how the lens, reflector, and led fit together.

4/26

Home again to to some modding, yeah! Let’s get to it.

The bottom plate will be 2 sheets of brass with the inner one being the thicker of the two. It will serve to prevent the oval from being compressed and causing the simple solder joint to fail. The outer thinner plate just laps the tube preventing compression from pushing the end in. The two pieces will be brazed together so that the joint between them remains unaffected by succeeding solder operations.

First I cut the pieces from some brass stock I obtained at the hardware store.

The thicker 3/4” material is just the right width so that I only need to round the ends. The wider piece will be rounded but left oversize as the parts tend to float during brazing.

I used the bits of tape to mark one end but before brazing I pulled the tape and made a nick to mark the side seam edge. Then I pasted one side of each piece with flux and brazed them together.

As you can see it indeed floated to one side but there is still enough room at the edge that when cleaned up the outer layer still overhangs the tube.

I won’t solder this piece in at this time as I want to make some kind of lanyard attachment point first but there is still another part that goes at this end, the spring board that connects the two batteries.

I first thought about soldering two springs to a plate and adding the solder wick spring mod but realized that wouldn’t be needed if I mounted the springs behind a copper strip that connects the 2 cells. I backed up the springs with a brass strip and some fiberglass cloth soaked in Devon 2-ton. The pic shows JB but I chose to use Devcon instead as it is a bit more fluid to permeate the cloth and cures a bit faster.

I sanded the 2 strips first then gave the copper strip some contact bumps since I’ll be using flat topped cells.

Sorry for that poor shot but it’s too late for another. Then I tinned the brass and copper pieces and soldered 2 springs in place 18 mm o.c.

Mixed up the Devcon, pasted the cloth and bedded the assembly. It cured while I ate dinner. FYI, epoxy doesn’t stick to ziplock bags.

After it cured it pulled away from the plastic very easily and I trimmed it to fit into the tube.

That’s all for now.

05/05

Got the lanyard ring done and here’s how. I started with a brass screw eye.

Heated it and opened it up.

And cut what I needed from it saving the rest for brass pegs.

Then I marked the hole centers, drilled and brazed it.

After cleaning up, this end piece will be ready to solder to the tube. That will happen sometime after I’ve finished cutting the tube to length and installing the switch housing.

6/14

Decided to install the switch parts last so I went ahead with soldering the tail piece into place. I also added another layer of brass to increase the depth of the seam and increase spring pressure on the batteries. No current flows through the springs(better not anyway)so they are fairly light gauge to ease fitting the spring plate through the battery access hole.

The extra layer prevents you from seeing the inside ends of the lanyard ring.

I’ll have to scrape that tiny blob on the right but the rest is pretty smooth, just a film of solder around the edge.

I generally think through as much as possible before I start a mod but I don’t figure everything out and often don’t even make any sketches. Other than the concept sketch there were no detailed drawings of last years project and there won’t be here either.

I want the battery tube to be short and not overly large in diameter. In fact, what feels comfortable in my small stubby hand (keep it clean folks) is a side by side 2x 18650 with fairly thin walls. Also I don’t want a tail cap switch but a thumb switch located right under my thumb. When doing demo I get to dismantle a variety of copper and brass fittings and thought these would be good parts to use for their corrosion resistance(at least the brass) so I started with a short piece of waste and overflow from a tub drain. Using a piece of wire to measure the circumference of both the 1 1/2” brass tube and that of 2 cells I figure I can remove at least 1/2” of material and still close the tube over the cells. Here is the tube being cut.

After annealing the cut piece and flattening it a bit I used a strip of brass to mark my 1/2” cut. This same piece of brass will overlay the seam when I braze it.

I masked the part I wanted to keep.

And spent about 20 minutes with the Dremel making the two cuts.

After several hours of painstaking work heating and bending the metal I got it close to the shape I wanted but started noticing bits starting to flake away. There was just a tiny one at first but by the time I was ready to braze it it looked like this.

Not so good for something that might go to 4 x atmospheric pressure. A bit disheartening but that piece was obviously old and poorly made to begin with. The walls were of uneven thickness which made it very difficult to bend in the right places and keep straight in others. Then OL posted about his travails and I didn’t feel so bad. In any case I had no option but to forge ahead and start over so I cut another piece, removed a strip, and started bending and heating again. This piece, while being a bit thinner is of an even thickness which made it a much quicker job to get it ovalized. I’ll post more pics this weekend hopefully of a successful brazing operation including an explanation of that small red “x” on the overlay strip.

Edit 4/23

That weekend and one or two others came and went. I spent quite a bit of time getting the tube bent just the way I wanted so it would easily fit the cells without too much excess space.

To get the final dimension just right I put the cells inside and twisted a loop of wire around each end and scored the overlap with an exacto knife then cut the last ~mm off with a Dremel wheel observing through my magnifying lamp. Then I used a flat file in the seam to dress the cut and some w/d paper to finish it off.

Then I pasted the seam with brazing flux and twisted copper wire around it to pull the seam shut and hit it with a mapp torch with the part sitting on a brick. After cleaning it up and a bit more time squeezing and bending and rolling a pipe in it it looked like this.

Not bad for hand formed. The bottom will be the easy end and I’ll do that next. It will be one oval piece that fits inside and another that laps the end of the tube.

05/04

After brazing the head end on I worked on the switch. I’ll be doing OL’s mod of a 10A Judco switch. Here is the switch and boot with the switch pried oped.

And here is the drilled tube and some of the parts. I taped the outer curved piece to the inner stock and sanded the profile with the drill bit/sandpaper method.

The boot is a perfect fit for one of these thin brass tubes so I drilled a matching hole in the tube and cut inner and outer pieces from the next larger size tubing and fitted them to the curve.

There is a doughnut disc and another short piece of tube that the switch will fit into. Before I solder this into place I’ll need to make a contact plate and ensure I can fit it through the cap hole. That’s all for now.

05/05

Did some more work on this. After one false start that destroyed some of these parts.

I started over being a bit more careful with the heat on This thin wall brass. To braze, the metal needs to heat to red-orange before the brazing material melts and it’s easy to over heat and melt the parts if the flame is too close. If I didn’t need to notch this for the switch, brazing would not be necessary but if I just soldered it then it would fall apart when I solder it into the tube.

From the top.

As soon as I fit a contact plate to the switch I can solder this into the tube with the other curved piece on the outside. Getting the switch into place through the battery hole will be difficult.

As I mentioned above, I followed Justin’s lead on modding a Judco switch but I’ll add these two small tips. Drill a hole big enough for the button and work the switch upside down and lay something down to support the contacts.

I’m concerned about water pressure on this switch since it’s a reverse clicky, any movement of the button and the light will turn off. This 10A switch already has a nice stiff spring but I’m preloading it a bit more by putting a spacer at one end.

That tiny bit of copper lower left was the first try but being only .5 mm thick it didn’t do much. Next up was the brass screw eye leftover( got my money’s worth out of that one!).

2 mm proved to be a bit too much and the switch wouldn’t “click” so I pulled that bit and cut another bit of copper from some scrap ~1.2mm thick and that did the trick. Won’t know til I get wet if it’s enough but first dive won’t have live cells.

Next up was the contact pad. I didn’t have a really clear notion at first but as I went along things became clearer. First was a brass strip that wraps around the switch and keeps water and spring pressure from blowing the bottom off the pins.

This was bent around the bottom with JB weld in between and clamped until set. Then the first of 3 layers of fiberglass was added.

Once that cured the first of the contacts was bent into place and soldered. I had pretinned the brass previously.

This was followed by more layers of fiberglass/JB weld. This build up is needed so the battery will clear the brass switch holder and contact the pad instead.

Between layers I cut and sanded away the excess. This switch also has to fit through the same hole as the batteries and the brass contact strip will take up some space so prior to each of the last two layers I sanded the corners round as well. Here it is sanded and ready for the contact strip.

I decided to add more JB to the other end and it’s wrapped up to cure. I’ll post close up of it with the strip tomorrow.

Edit- as promised.

Here’s the module in the tube.

What it looks like inside. You can make out the second copper contact bent over and soldered. Since I’m using flat topped cells I did what I could to dome the brass and also added a dollop of solder and sanded that so the middle of the dome was ~9-10 mm from the tube. This pic also shows how the inner curved piece of brass fits the inside of the tube with some JB added as an insulator.

Here it is with one of the cells.

5/28

This was an all or nothing play. I haven’t tried this before and got the idea from a post a few months back of a link to a nifty looking steampunk light saber mod on Epbot. First I cut the tube to length leaving ~1/2mm or so to true up the end with sandpaper on my fir ply lap desk.

Then I cut open a soda can and cut a piece from that and also some brass bug screen to match the tube. I tried it first on the flawed first tube.

It didn’t work all that well as there were more places were the solder missed than there were where it bonded the mesh.

I thought maybe there might have been some fabricating oil on the mesh so I cleaned it first and and rolled the dice on the real part. This was all guesswork and I used up a small tube of solder paste in the process but starting with just some of the solder paste and wrapping that with aluminum(not supposed to apply flame directly to the paste) I tinned the tube. After a few of those to get the feel of it I did I it again this time with the brass mesh under the aluminum. It didn’t look too good at first but after cleaning, repasting, and reheating several times adding solder wire as well it ended up well enough to go on. I used up 2 soda cans(2 sections from each so maybe six reheats) and sometimes the solder would run out without bonding the mesh and I would have given up but had decided one way or another I was going to keep dumping solder into this #%^€?£¥$&@! piece until it succumbed to my will. I didn’t take any other pictures during the heat of battle but after a few hours not knowing whether it was working or if I had wasted a month here it is.

I’m gassed.

6/19

The Secret Part, what’s it do? Remember this pic from way back in the dim and distant past?

It’s the strip that originally was going to reinforce the seam but will now cover and contain the seam of the brass mesh. The “X” is where the secret lies. At the top right of this next pic you can see a phone case with a belt clip.

The case snaps to the clip with a disc separated from a backing plate by a short 5/16” post. I’m going to recreate the disc and post on the strip that covers the seam. The clip has a detent that allows the disc to lock at several rotation points.(the tiny grooves for that will be added later). Here is the strip, post, and disc after brazing.

On the back is another strip. You can see how the back strip fits between the edges of the mesh while the top strip to covers the edges.

To hold the strip snug into place I recovered the mesh with the soda can, laid some scrap tube on top, and wrapped it all up in copper wire.

I spent several hours chasing my tail on this as the solder tends to flow around the tube and accumulate everywhere but where you want it. At one point the bottom fell out(I should have brazed that but chickened out) and I had to clean that up and resolder it as well. Fortunately the mesh stayed put throughout the battle. In the end it was all successfully assembled.

It’s a bit ugly but still kinda cool so I can live with it. It also seems very secure. I’ll fill the tube void somehow as it would hang up on the clip.

Solder paste blah
Link to MT-G2 driver mod

Trust me to be lost already. I understood the blah blah and tantrums, I got totally lost with solder paste. Where does that fit in?

Between, like the title says.

Wow. I did not see that before. If I was a gambling man I would not be putting money on you not finishing this light. Who's sink no longer drains outside?

He ran out of hemorrhoid cream…

I busted up an old tub to get it out of a house. New tub has a new cheesy plastic drain. Other brass parts are ~$4/lb at the salvage yard. Copper is $6/lb. A 10440 will fit through a 5/16” flare nut or a 3/8” compression fitting and an 18650 fits through a 5/8” compression fitting(standard 1/2” copper pipe). DIY threads. :bigsmile:

1st bump.

Welcome aboard buddy.

Bump

If I don't agree with anything else you say I agree with your thoughts, not bad for hand formed. Looking good but it is early days, well one third through.

Another bump(2, to be precise).

That is fantastic work! I just love watching what you can do with metal. It's friggin awesome stuff!

What OL said. Not sure about the friggin though?

Awesome work. Looks great already.

I have a lot of brazing planned for both the copper and the aluminum parts of my build. I guarantee, none of it will look as nice as yours. I've only brazed for utilitarian purposes, never to look good at the same time.

Going to be a lot of bumps ahead.