Great scott! You’re onto something there! I will of course be adding a heat exchanger sleeve to the spiral cable to keep temps and resistances at an absolute minimum. Keeping the electron charge pressures high and temps low will certainly improve total max lumens when the …erm… PWMs? hit the redline…or something
Let me stop you right there! What’s this “sense” thing you’re talking about? I’m pretty sure I’m lacking it
An internal fan would probably work quite well in the shorty config as you say and keep things much neater, but there’s plenty of reasons I’ve gone this route (for now anyway, it’s a rough and ready first pass concept).
Primarily though I just liked the idea of strapping a large blower to the side of a powerful light, to me at least it looks pretty sweet hanging off the side like that. Goes with the modular/tactical nonsense design of the rest of the light. Not much actual sense involved in that decision and preferences can vary.
I had to seriously restrain myself from adding a second blower onto the other side you know! haha
Apart from the sense deficiency I’m also lacking in machining equipment/skill so I tend to shy away from anything that involves too much external machining on the light itself. The thought of a lot of drilling into an anodized BTU pill or body (they’re getting rare as hens teeth you know ) without having the option of covering mistakes with a bolt head doesn’t sound particularly appealing to me.
Finally I do want to maintain some basic water proofing on the base light. It’s never going to go underwater unscathed but it should survive a quick drop in a puddle or sitting in some melting snow (for emergency cooling ) without something internal going fizz. That’s also why I want the blower module detachable in case it’s raining outside or whatever. Not to mention if the external fan goes pop (don’t know how many million operating hours are on my particular sample since it came from a server) it’s a five minute job to swap it out.
Having said that the XLR plug on my current light isn’t yet waterproof but a bit of silicone on the inside grounding tab opening and an oring around the fixture will take care of that. I also have other unsealed lights and I hate the condensation issues you get on the inside of the lens when it’s cold outside. Can’t be having any of that here.
What I really like about the idea of an internal blower is a way of shifting some air directly over the driver components. But I think as long as I can maximize the heat sink path of the critical internal components to the pill then the blower will do a good job of removing a decent chunk of that heat from the surface. It’s not ideal because of the limited surface area but should do a decent enough job, especially to more quickly return the light to a safe temperature after a turbo stint. The light has so much mass that left to it’s own devices just sitting there it takes an absolute age to cool back down after it’s hit a soak at 70deg.
Thanks for the comment though, I’ll probably try an implementation of your internal fan idea (easy enough to try on the 3d prototype) and see how it could work.
Linus