****Copper Eagle Eye X6 heatsinks****(design)

I would love to have more non blf lights measured but i only have one on hand and only one member posted in my other thread asking for help ?? And if it don't fit perfectly more copper is better than less

^ Yup, I don’t have the equipment to mill it or work metal where I am, that’s why I’d want to buy one. So if it didn’t fit, I wouldn’t want to buy in the first place, if the question of it fitting was not guaranteed or at least returnable.

If it were 0.5mm too long, the head wouldn’t screw on quite all the way. Half a millimeter.

I don’t have a light in hand to measure, but I simply can’t see where you two are coming from. Exactly how is that area critical? Is the large, 31.7mm wide shelf not also directly connected to the fins?

  • That larger shelf surface alone provides 1900 square millimeters of contact area by itself. The 20mm shelf provides only 1250 square mm of contact area.
  • The outer surface of the 31.7mm cylinder provides 1110 square mm of contact area. The outer surface of the short 20mm cylinder provides 250 square mm of contact area.

In other words the top section provides 3010 square mm of contact area, which is quite a large amount. [More than Old Lumens uses on his current MT-G2 Maglite heatsinks IIRC?] The bottom protrusion provides an additional 1500 square mm… and causes a potential fitment issue!!

This is exactly what I’m talking about! This is where that extra protrusion on the bottom seems like a problem: it provides little benefit that I can see, increases cost, and appears to cause a fitment issue.

I am not sure what the issue is. If the X6-SE indeed does have a lower emitter shelf than that if a stock X6 and the difference is is only (.5) mm that that would equal 0.019685 inches and could easily and quickly be sanded down with a flat surface and some 80 grit sandpaper - aluminum or copper.

On a different note...Dowel/alignment pins should also be unnecessary and just create a manufacturing expense.

What is the cost on the quad sink? $10? How much do you think a machinist would knock off for NOT performing that one operation? $1?

I won’t bother to check your math cause you’re pretty dang brilliant, but if I can add 1250 sq. millimeter to 1900, then by gosh I’m all for it!

That vertical area that you are referring to is under the threads of the bezel. I’ve always been told that a lot of thermal path is lost in threaded sections. So perhaps depending on that section almost exclusively for your thermal path is not the best of ideas? Do you have an X6 in hand? Look at it. The head of the light, the part where the emitter sits normally, the part in question on the sink, that’s right at the finned portion of the outside that is contiguous with the emitter shelf, a solid one piece milled head. The area above that is threaded, sits under the bezel. See?

Mine was built from a single bar of 1.25” diameter 6061. I bought that for making a triple sink. So it doesn’t touch metal above the head of the light. This makes that emitter shelf a vital area. Adding contact to that, under the bezel or not, can only help. But the vital part is still the emitter shelf. The heat travels into the metal in much the same conical radiance pattern that the light leaves the emitter. I like having deep thermal sink directly under the source to catch it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not so tight I can’t part with a dollar.

  • I disagree with the first part. The whole point of having that 20x2mm protrusion on the bottom is to create a good thermal interface on that round 20mm face. Once the average user sands it down it’s just not going to be flat enough for that. That’s a big part of why a lathe is employed here in the first place…
  • The second part makes it clear that I haven’t adequately demonstrated my point, despite writing volumes upon volumes. :frowning: I brought up the pins specifically as something that was unnecessary and should not be included. Just like the 20mm protrusion is unnecessary….

The issue is that: 1. I’m stubborn. 2. I have a valid suggestion which improves compatibility and reduces cost with what I strongly suspect will be zero performance penalty. 3. Either nobody cares or nobody understands, or both. What can you do, eh? <shrug>

Will all see when the sample is test fitted , under $20 for a copper custom heatsink is a darn good price i think

Clearly miscommunication on my part.

I do agree with the protrusion to reach the emitter shelf. almost seems silly not to have. I just wonder the actual need to machine at 1.5mm or 2.0mm depth. I can take off an excess but I cannot add for a shortage. Even without precision tooling the shelves I have seen are not all that perfect anyway so a dab of paste after machining or sanding would not worry me. Hand lapping is performed on custom PC's everyday and they achieve good thermal transfer.

In reality, especially with the quad adapter the added cubes alone will more than help with heat dissipation.

Dowels? Well my Dremel will take care of those pesky things. LOL

I do not have one in hand. I’ve been waiting for the host since I wasn’t interested in the BLF Edition driver or stock single LED config. (and now I’m scratching my head since I may as well purchase a complete light w/ the host being a bit pricey)

What if you could add 5000? What about 10000? Would it do anything?

As far as shaving a buck off… that’s a matter of strategy. If you come back to the same machinist with the proposed change and he’s a normal sort of person then I would not expect much of a discount… [After all, if he’s marking up all his work then the more work he does for you the more money he makes… in order to maintain the same profit he’s already set his sights on for the job he’s got to mark up a lesser quantity of work to a larger extent] If you reset the encounter to one where you are asking a fresh, untainted individual to produce a stack of 5.7mm thick disks w/ two clean faces, a specific precise diameter, and a center drill… then I think you’d be getting somewhere. (based on the reasoning I posted back in post #78… we’re actually talking about a lot less work IMO.)

[realizing that I’m not actually a machinist] I’d expect to get around 15-20% more heatsinks out of a copper bar based on the 3 sections: 5.7mm top section, 2mm protrusion, 1/8in for what’s wasted by a saw or parting tool.

Between the copper savings and reducing the number of operations I’d expect to reduce cost significantly, not just $1.

I could be wrong about the whole thing. I’m certainly not going to build two lights and send them off to have somebody stick them in a sphere and compare, so maybe it’s best I let the subject drop.

Where would be the fastest place to buy a non blf x6 ???

His hosts aren’t complete for some reason beyond American understanding, but it could be assembled with parts on hand. For example, the lens is available through various sources, I have several taken out of previous X6’s and replaced with UCLp versions. The switch has already been linked, o-rings can easily be found.

If Richard wanted to or had time to, he could measure 75 lights for you. :wink:

I would re-measure mine, but it’s sitting under a hard earned quad heatsink and I’m not feeling like taking it apart. :stuck_out_tongue:

Ugh. Sigh sigh sigh! OK: When you hand lap a CPU and a heatsink, let’s assume you lap them against either each other OR against a “true flat” surface. Whatever, in our hypothetical scenario they mate perfectly afterwards, right? Great. What doesn’t matter in that case is that the CPU’s top surface (top of the IHS / lid) is no longer square with the sides. [Because you’ve been lapping it freehand of course, you don’t have a machine which can keep your grip perfect enough!] Why doesn’t it matter you ask? Well, we’re clamping another flat surface across it with springs [the heatsink w/ it’s retention bracket], so that other surface will simply tilt until it mates correctly with the perfectly-flat-but-no-longer-square-with-anything IHS!

Now think about what happens when you place a rod (the heatsink is a stubby rod) into an empty cylinder (flashlight head) where it fits tightly… and the bottom is no longer square to the rest. See the problem? The tight fit around the circumference requires that the faces be square or you’ll have a tiny, tiny contact patch.

Furthermore, in order to achieve contact on both surfaces the bottom post/protrusion must be of exactly the right height. Too much and you only get one surface… too little? You only get one surface…

Isn’t it amazing how seemingly simple things get complicated so fast?

Free hand? Why? Doesn’t the sink have a hole through the middle? A bolt through that hole allows it to be mounted in a drill so it can be spun, a file, sandpaper, rotary tool, S30V Spyderco, lots of ways to cut it once it’s spinning, not so difficult then to keep it square… not perfect, perhaps, but much closer than freehand.

Alex :) I completely understand and this the need for the paste. My whole purpose of purchasing rather than making is time vs. money. My toolpathing would take me more time than it would be worth to make "one" and the quad could be a pain since I do not have the parts to check fitment....guess better go to RMM's site :)

I had to cut a stem on the table saw that would chuck into the drill press. Then I literally used a broken HSS planer blade clamped in a drill press vise and swung the table by hand for the cross cuts. To cut the cup, much of it was blind. The table and vise were in the way. Between squatting in front of that bench top drill press that’s over 30 years old and from Harbor Freight in the first place and my shoulder knifing me, it was quite fun! :slight_smile: But I don’t hold any corner on stubborn, do I? If the wife, a CNA, saw even a little of how I do things out in the shed, she’d have conniption fits for sure!

Oh, by the way, did you know that if you clamp a high speed steel 70 yr old planer blade into a 100 yr old floor mount vise and hit it with a large metal object it will cleanly break like a piece of glass? And then you have a sharp new cutting surface! :slight_smile:

Be careful man. The wife could be reading LOL.

Just think. First you ask her to throw things at you at high velocity and now you are talking about attempting to change physics. She's going to take the meds away! LOL

It’s your god given right to be stubborn wight. Right or wrong everyone else has it too so what can you do? Being the prick that I am, I just had to do a math check though.

Area of a shelf is pi*r^2 minus emitter hole or 3.14*15.85^2 - 3.14*10^2 or 3.14*(15.85^2-10^2) or 475mm^2.

Area of shelf plus emitter pad area is 789mm^2.

Area of 5.6mm high rim is 2pi*r*h or 6.28*15.85*5.6 or 557mm^2

Area of 2mm lip is 126mm.

Other than to agree with wight about the difficulty in getting both bottom surfaces to mate at the same time I do tend to also agree that the emitter area does seem to add significantly more contact surface area to the host. Whether that additional contact area is needed is left as an exercise for the reader. Me, I’m just throwing marbles on the dance floor. :stuck_out_tongue:

If the best place to mate the heat-sink is the emitter hole (where the MCPCB would usually sit), then it doesn’t make any sense to not use that area. Add to that the math showing how much added contact you are getting by mating both the hole and the shelf. As for the possibility of not getting one or the other mated due to differing height, well let’s think about this. If the protrusion on the heat-sink is machined ~0.5mm too long, you don’t get a mate between the heat-sink and the shelf. Put some thermal paste on the shelf and forget about it. That would be better than having the protrusion too short and using some thermal compound at the most critical point for best heat transfer to the fins. As for leaving out the protrusion entirely, I think I’ll just leave this here:

(Emphasis mine)