Modifying the FandyFire Rook, what to do with this driver? *Pic Heavy*

I got em from Kai domain for $14 ea. bare, stuck em on Noctigon MT-G2 stars.

I got all the paint off from last nights venture. Also got all the silver reflective surface off. :stuck_out_tongue: Now it’s a gold reflector. No kidding, gold as it can be…the brass plating to allow the vapor discharge coating to stick. :wink: Actually looks pretty cool just like this, but of course I won’t stop here. I will, however, get some lightbox readings on what it’s doing when in this state and I took a photo… will share that later when I get it uploaded.

War Hawk, this things got a ~35mm x 35mm reflector in it, the little 10mm TIR wouldn’t work at all. But thanks! :slight_smile: I actually do have some TIR optics, hmmmm… think I’ll just polish this aluminum one, it’s nice and heavy, will add heat sinking to the equation.

Always wondered what reflector looks like down to the brass under layer. Hope you post a pic eventually.

I have a 35mmØx16.4mm LEDIL single TIR on the way, whenever it gets here you can have it if your interested, I went a different route. Another cool option would be a fresnel but the guy that sells them is out of 38’s right now.

I’m curious to see the reflector now.

I think the reflector and it’s size is one of the things that appealed to me about the Rook. And it’s miniature SkyRay King look.

Trying to take the frosting off, well it wasn’t working. Trying to polish it off, left the brass?? base layer which looked like this…

Looked neat, but robbed too much of the output.

So, I got my stubborn hat on and petitioned Congress and in the end, prevailed. Let me say though that the brass or whatever it is DID NOT WANT to be removed! As it turns out, this is probably a good thing because I had to up my game on it to accomplish what I wanted. When they turned the reflector there were fine circumferential lines left under the plating…and these tend to make rings in the beam as they are opposed to the path of light. So I hit the darn thing with 320 grit in a top to bottom approach and cut out all the fine circumferential marks. By the time I was done sanding and polishing, it’s even better than it was to begin with! :slight_smile: A ring of the brass or whatever remains at the very base, that small portion of the flat that’s left after I opened it up for the big SST-90.

That little “frosting” experiment got kinda costly in time and effort! :wink:

Whoa!, that is fantastic. and that brass ring looks fricken cool.

So now that is bare aluminum, right? It will start oxidizing amost immediately. How will you seal it? Car wax maybe?

That looks great, what grit paper did you go up to and then what type of polish? I have a light I need to do that with.

I agree the brass ring at the base looks sweet.

It is indeed “bare” aluminum, except for the bare part. The polish is wax based so it is sealed even before it get’s to a full finish. I took short cuts, from 320 to 1000 grit under running water. then Mother’s Billet Aluminum polish and a final seal of Renaissance Wax.

What are the reflector dimensions?

Nice!

Without taking it back out of the light, it appears to be “square” at 35mm x 35mm.

I don’t have any way to mount such a thing as a reflector to spin it up, so all this was done strictly by hand. Left hand held the reflector, right hand sanded and polished. Only took a few hours…

Cutting the emitter opening larger I freehanded the reflector while holding the Proxxon rotary in the other hand, eyeballing the dimensions. Worked out pretty well if I do say so myself. :wink:

Even though the Noctigon is thinner than the 2mm aluminum star that was in the light from the factory, the Luminus emitter is very thick and takes up the difference plus a half mm. So the bezel doesn’t screw on all the way, with the reflector sitting on top of the window pane around the emitter. (bottom of star to centering ring shelf for the reflector measured out at 2.5mm, bottom of the Noctigon to the top of the window pane on the SST-90 is 3mm) It’s all good, because this allows good firm pressure on the Noctigon/Luminus to hold it snugly against the shelf and keep the thermal paste a very thin layer.

http://www.cnqualitygoods.com/goods.php?id=1602 (edit: or same thing from FT: http://www.fasttech.com/products/1208505)

The threads around the front end can be filed off if it's too big, plenty of meat there to not affect the shiny part. I used one in the MTG2 C8 with an Al adapter ring. Very nice beam, pretty to look at even on a white wall.

I’ll bookmark that one and keep it in mind.

The OP version I used for my C8 works very well in that one as well, much better than the mirror finished one I started with.

This one is back to having the hot spot look like it’s using an MT-G2, with the tiny spots in the hot-spot, even though there’s no such thing in the emitter. Don’t know why it’s doing that unless it’s got something to do with the wires dividing the emitter up into narrow panels.

The reflector is even better now, with a nicer spill. :slight_smile:

Like I said…if you wanted to sell that rook back to me, I certainly wouldn’t mind.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Yesterday I took beamshots with the reflector "frosted" with a clear reflective paint. Tonight I have new beamshots of the hand polished reflector. Last nights shot is the base, mouse over for the polished reflector.

Oh yeah, the red oil drum is 97 yds away. So essentially, this little Rook is now lighting up an object somewhat smaller than a person at the other end of a football field. Not bad, not bad at all! :)

Beam looks great. I now know that I should not dispare if I ruin an aluminum reflector finish. I just need to break out the sandpaper, Mothers, Renaissance, and a some elbow grease.

Thank you for teaching me something very cool this week DBC!

Make sure you've got the big can of patience, as it can be a daunting task! :)

You're welcome. O-L might get it to a higher degree of polish, not sure. I need to go to the Paint & Body Supply Shop and get some serious grits of wet/dry. I'm out of 400, 600 and 2000.

Remember what I was taught at the gunsmith shop, each grade of paper up gets a direction change. In this way you're always cutting across the peaks and it'll show when you get to the valleys. Ultimately it will yield the absolute best finish. Did that for my buddy the gunsmith to an 1914 Model 1911 in .380 ACP. When I got the slide and frame to a mirror finish, he blued it. It had that Colt Python ultimate blue look to it, simply gorgeous! Neat little gun. I didn't know until then that there were any other chamberings for the Mod 1911 other than .45 ACP.

When I first sanded it down, I was going to leave the very bottom, around the emitter, in the gold color. I finished it out and put the Renaissance Wax on it and everything. Then decided I had to go all the way. I went to the utility sink and started running water through it to start sanding again and the Renaissance Wax beaded the water like crazy! I mean, it wouldn't leave a drop in the reflector! Very cool. So I know with that microcrystalline wax on the surface, it's good to go. ;)

I wonder how much one of those red mothers wheel polishing balls that goes in a drill would help. Not that it needs it or anything.

Never used one, don't know. I find that a rotary style powered device is easy to get lines in your project.

When they cut the parabola it was done with the reflector spinning, so the cut lines were around the circumference. The light goes bottom to top, directly opposing the cut lines and these lines are what make rings in the beam profile, or partly. So when I sanded it down by hand I used a short in/out stroke with the sandpaper, opposite the machining marks and effectively removed all those lines. Any lines left by my fine sandpaper are linear to the path of the light, less likely to show in the beam. I can't see any marks at all and I can see some very small stuff, the macro on the camera shows only the faintest marks left, so I could have taken the polish phase just a wee bit further.

Modded the little Rook one more time… this last mod was sticking an SBT-70 into it on a 26mm MaxToch copper mcpcb. I’d already bored the tube for a single 18500 and had Texas Ace’s Texas Avenger board in it with Narsil. So now it’s making 2042.4 lumens on the 18500 cell. Gotta love it!