4th Annual BLF/OL Scratch Made Light Contest- Hand Made 10/31 finished

Looking so good! Great job on the reflector filing. It looks like it was meant to be that way!

Brazing the head Moved to post #123.

Marvelous!

Lookin’ Good bump :wink:

Thank you bump. One more and I relocate 118 to 122 and it loads fast again. Only seen a few pics of your light CRX but it looks fantastic. If it were only that piece I was competing against I’d still have my doubts about winning, a fantastic piece of imagination and craftsmanship.

Hah, I realized I also have a jig saw and metal cutting blades so I cut a square of sheet brass to join the two pieces and cleaned it up for brazing. Being still a bit ricketty I preloaded the brazing wire in the corners so all I bhad to do was heat it up. If the parts weren’t yet hot enough I could have pushed the top piece right off the bottom one with the brazing wire. After letting it cool I used some snips and roughly trimmed the edge. Then used a grinder and sandpaper to finish it off. next I used the calipers to scratch center marks. A sharp centering punch for the first drill bit (1/16”). I used the calipers again to mark the direction of my centering error and with each successive increase in bit size measured and marked how to angle the bit to make a correction. At 5/32 I switched to an exacto knife to finish and ended up within .05mm. I doubt the reality of that given how the edge was ground but certainly close enough to go on.

Going on means stacking the parts with the screw/washer/nut jig as a centering guide and loading it up with flux. Torched! It may look ugly to others but it’s beautiful to me and just some cleaning, cutting, and assembly to go. I’ll give it a hot bath in Fuse Clean to make sure all the flux gets removed but that’s all for the torch work on the head. The jig piece even cooperated by not getting brazed in. I really won’t know how true it ended up until it’s assembled and I spin it to cut the excess from the fins but no visible disasters so far.

9/06 Home at last. A little Fuze Clean and Mothers.
Next

I hope you didn’t think I was gonna leave it like that.

Nice work RBD. Do you use acid to clean the flux etc off?

Some stuff called Fuze Clean FS. Comes as small crystals you dissolve in water and heat to ~160F. Toss in the hot part and seconds later it’s clean. Reusable as long as it keeps working and safe to dispose of. I bought two jars and just finished the first after 2 years.

I did a Google search and not much comes up. In images it shows a couple of your pictures.

Link

Thanks. It certainly works well.

It does. I giggled with glee the first time I used it. Even now it’s a great to see the practically instantaneous change. I used to solder as much as I could, now I braze wherever possible.

Rufus, You make my head hurt!!! You take the cake at bringing a bucket of parts together into a work of art. The wood is just stunning. Great work!!! TL

Thanks TL, a long way to go still and a lot more parts to fill the bucket.

A painful but productive couple of days but heck, if it didn’t hurt I’d be working and getting nothing done. :+1: First off, I drilled out the brass sheet, first with a step drill to 1/4” then with a 5/8” hole saw and finished it off with a dremel sanding drum and ran the 20 x 1 mm tap through it to finish the threading. After that I cut some of the excess from the copper core. I need a place to put an o-ring between the head and the tube and this piece I cut the bezel threads from should work nicely(shown before the previous cut). Before cutting off the part I want to use I tapped threads for a few mm. This hand cutting bites but my reciprocating saw is most definitely a two handed tool. I’ll get back to this piece in a bit but I also need to fabricate the place where it goes. For that I need a P60 brass pill and some brass tubing. First thing to do is run the threads the rest of the way up the pill. Not having the approved tool holders and such I’m making do. Poor little pill, this will hurt me more than it hurts you. Well, maybe it will hurt a little but fair is fair. Some time in the future it will get brazed to a short section of this brass tubing. And that other chunk of brass will thread onto it capping the wood of the battery tube at one end. That piece is over 5 mm thick and will end up only 3mm or so(just enough for the notch to cover a 1.5mm o-ring and have a bit of thread). The tube piece will have the switch inside and fit inside a newly remade battery tube. While I had the hack saw out I cut another one. Not easy cutting left handed when you’re a righty. After a bit of time, annealing, filing and fitting(I clamped the file in the vise so I could push/pull on the part lefty), I applied plenty of flux, slipped on two brass collars and a copper one, and brazed it. I didn’t want the copper piece to braze, just act as a belt to hold the joint closed so I didn’t flux under it except at the joint itself. No flux>no brazing and I could easily remove most of the collar. The fine line on the left is the brazed seam, so is the blobby crap on the right where I had to add more after booting it around the floor some. Check in after the week end to see how it turns out after cleanup and tapping.
Grinding along

Sawing by hand is hard enough, I hate to think of doing it “wrong” handed. :frowning:

You have me pondering my scrap box of brass and copper again. :smiley:

Looking good
Your dog would be at home with my mob

I’m following real closely RBD. Amazing work. I understand whats going on as much as I understand LTP post were spell check has worked its charm. :+1:

Enjoying EVERY image! The hours are adding up Rufus!!! Tons of skill and patience! :beer: :beer: :beer:

Thanks for sharing. TL