DBC2, EDC Quad XP-G3, now DBC-04 with XP-L2 and Carclo quad optic

Ha… I see what your sayin’:slight_smile:

Looks like an awesome little light. It’s fulfilling to see the works of your own hands, hey?

Very impressive light
Amazing looking and shining!

>> The crazy thing is, I did this while coming off a double dose of the sedatives I sometimes have to take. I mostly remember doing it, but the time it took seems kinda foggy. lol Just wandered out there and did it.

Well done. Really nice. I do not remember what would have happened if you had taken something more enhanced :partying_face: Flux capacitor?

K.

Nice try Pat! :stuck_out_tongue:

I was drugged Tuesday, from Monday nights issues, DHL brought new Cutter T-Pad quad boards Tuesday around 2:00 in the afternoon and I had just gotten the new XP-G3’s last week. I felt the need to use the new boards so I grabbed up the components needed… I’ve got small Omten and large Omten switches, but I don’t have switch boards sitting around. I only had the lighted board because someone was nice enough to give me a couple to play with. :slight_smile: At any rate, I grabbed what was readily available and headed out to the shop. I didn’t even take a rubber boot out there, so I guesstimated how thick the overall stack would be with the switch pcb, switch, cover plate and boot, cut the necessary pocket into the end of the battery tube and threaded it. Winging it, as it were. I remember pilotdog68 saying these pcbs were very robust and I didn’t need to worry about a through-board bypass, so it made sense to use one here.

The sedative I take is Ativan, used to sort of reboot my system. I have stress and/or cold related muscle spasms (medically referred to as a Conversion Disorder), if I get chilled it can happen and I can get a chill from a breeze on a 105º day when I’m sweating. Difficult to know really just what starts the process, even after nearly 16 years of it. I only take the sedative when the spasms make my head shake violently side to side. This has occurred often enough that over the years that now I get an instant splitting headache and Monday night it was bad enough to make me nauseous. So Tuesday, I had the micro concussion feeling as well as the left-over sedation… groggy, bit of a stagger, probably shouldn’t have worked on the lathe at all. I didn’t go out til like 2:30PM, but then I didn’t come back in til just after 8:30! Lost all track of time, but had TexasLumens’ voice nagging me about safety and keeping fingers and such. lol So yeah, I was making the effort to be careful, but did start getting hurried considering the time and that I hadn’t eaten and darkness was taking over. (the rats move into the shed at dark, and possibly a skunk, so I try to be gone…) I live in the country, there’s cattle fields surrounding the shed and hay stacked outside one wall, heck the adjoining section of shed is a stall and hay loft! So the varmints are to be expected, even if it’s a bit eerie.

As far as mad skills or the use of the lathe, it’s Justin’s fault. It’s all Justin’s fault. :stuck_out_tongue: Him and his crazy Scratch Build Challenges. That’s where it all started for me back with the .50 BMG flashlight build. So his challenge started it, now the lathe that came from him (and BLF) and so it goes, isn’t that always how “mad scientists” get created? :stuck_out_tongue:

Appreciate the compliments, really I do, am humbled.

When you learn to do things, you also criticize your work. Shoulda done this, coulda done that… and sometimes you re-do things that should have been left alone! I now have to take this DBC2 back apart and address how the driver is mounted. I need to make a threaded brass retaining ring to hold it down firmly and make better ground contact and will probably have to cut some threads off the end of the battery tube to keep fitment proper. (Sounds simple enough, right? I’ll probably have to seat the driver a bit deeper in the copper, so I’ll have to be cutting down into the hole where the threads are, easy to mess up copper threads by the way!)

Scary, as I really really like how the light is right now. But you know, it’s an addiction…

Awesome little light! I see the foundation for that 26650 special we have been working on in the other thread!

For the record, the head is 33mm in diameter, smaller sections of battery tube are 23mm while the raised sections are 28.6mm. Overall length is 92.8mm. It weighs 181 grams with an Efest purple IMR18350 cell installed.

Yep…… you now know where a scratch builder lives in the world.

Your comment…

” When you learn to do things, you also criticize your work. Shoulda done this, coulda done that… and sometimes you re-do things that should have been left alone! I now have to take this DBC2 back apart and address how the driver is mounted. I need to make a threaded brass retaining ring to hold it down firmly and make better ground contact and will probably have to cut some threads off the end of the battery tube to keep fitment proper. (Sounds simple enough, right? I’ll probably have to seat the driver a bit deeper in the copper, so I’ll have to be cutting down into the hole where the threads are, easy to mess up copper threads by the way!)
Scary, as I really really like how the light is right now. But you know, it’s an addiction… ”

…… about sums it up. I never build a light that inside, I am 100% satisfied with. You sir are stuck on SQUARE ONE for the rest of your days. Tell me in the months to come that I am wrong… I’ll be waiting!! Ha! :innocent: I design, I build a prototype, I then build 10, 5, 20….whatever…. and somewhere throughout that I always find something I could have done better!!

You’re doing good!!! TL

OOOOOO…. I like that!! I have noticed you are fond of that slot-less screw look!! Ship builder?? :stuck_out_tongue: Sure a nice clean look!!! TL

Will, I thought about a before and after pic while on the way out to make changes, so I grabbed my 20D and took a quick shot, turned it off and went to the shop. When I was done I picked back up the 20D and took another shot. I THOUGHT I had put it in manual, but it must have been in Aperture Priority… that or I bumped a control wheel in handling it which is why Pro’s use Pro Bodies, those kinds of inadvertent settings changes don’t happen with a Pro body like a 1DsMkII but with the consumer level cameras, juggling flashlights and cameras and what not can lead to a wheel getting bumped. Shutter speed would have been controlled by the large wheel on the back of the camera, the easiest one to mess up with, so that’s probably what happened. I seldom use the 20D, my primary camera is the 1DsMkII. Both the 5DMkII and 7DMkII will easily suffer the same issue as the 20D, as will the G1X. Too many cameras…

The shot with the Carclo was at f5.6, 1/60, ISO800
The shot with the Khatod was at f5.6, 1/30, ISO800

Which is why it looks so much brighter. Sorry about that. I was “focusing” on the beam profile and spot size, totally missed the settings difference.

Great looking light. People throw money at talent & quality. Those guys knew a good thing when they saw it. Can’t wait to see more of your randomly inspired creations.

Whatever Dale! :wink: By all means….keep making those mistakes that you are referring to - yet is art to us wittle laymen peoples

I need to finish my Marvin the Martian ray gun. :slight_smile: The green laser has been sitting on my desk for months, with the monstrously finned main tube sitting on top of an external hard drive like a heat sink. lol

Can that 1/30 be ‘changed’ to 1/60 in software? Does Photoshop have a fix for that? I know it won’t be the same as getting it right to begin with, but maybe close enough?

Ho-ly Carp that looks amazing

David, you’re asking me to cheat? :stuck_out_tongue:
Of course, 1/30th to 1/60th is one stop, so I could darken the 1/60th one stop or brighten the 1/30th one stop, either way. I do that all the time for weddings and portraits, expose right, back it off in processing, that captures more detail, but this is flashlights, is cheating allowed?

Edit: Sorry, expose right is a photography term, 2/3 of all detail is in the highlights, so if we expose the picture to the right of 0 then we capture more detail, bring it back down when processing to fill in the shadows as they should be. This also helps suppress digital noise in the shadows. :wink:

Well, as long as everyone is made aware that it has been post processed…

However, I just realized that since you know what the settings are/were, you could just take another picture with the correct settings! :wink:

True enough, BUT, I rebuilt the way the driver mounts, inset it deeper into the copper head and made a thick brass retaining ring, took the light from ~2560 to 2701 lumens. :wink:

I pulled the bezel and optics and put a 20ga loop between the pad and negative lead, got a direct amperage measurement.

0.01 Amps
0.18
0.86
3.05
7.57 Amps at 2680 lumens

So each of the XP-G3 S5 3A is getting just under 2A, which is the spec max for these new emitters. This is on the Efest IMR18350 cell, which has been taking a beating lately, lol.

I’ve squared away the switch seat, made a brass cover plate for the top of the switch, so I know every ground point is as solid as I can make it. Pulled the resistors off the lighted tail cap in favor of full functionality of the Bistro driver.

A beautiful light and liking how well the XPG3’s worked out. Plus the runtime.

Some of my best reworks and inventions come from boredom coupled with a large dose of “I wonder what will happen if I try this?” mixed in. Never let your own mind or conventionality restrict you to blandness. Dare to do your own thing!

Phil

Thanks Phil.
I think it’s funny that I built my own light, then turned around and modded it. hahahahaha (and then again!) :wink: