Next level aux lights

I still occasionally dream of having a 4th axis cnc but it’s not gonna happen Tired but luckily china makes items that i can use to make/modify into a tricked up torch.

I saw this hair clipper, got an idea in my head and just had to try and make it work. I hate those bulky skulls that bolt onto pocket clips but this is a whole new concept. I’ve actually been working in this for a few months but had other stuff taking priority for a while. It’s nearly finished now :sushi: :beer:

First pic is the gutted host alongside another hair clipper

I didn’t notice till i had it pulled apart the dent in the tail

Some parts…

Turns out the skull design is on a separate plate that i managed to pry off without damaging much at all.

First up I worked on the body and inner tube. The stock body has a large enough ID to simply slip in an inner tube. Later I will use capton tape to isolate the inner tube.

Next i made a copper ring and soldered it to the inner contact ring on the Lume1 driver. This ring press fits into the inner tube, holding the driver central so there’s no chance of shorting to the outer tube

Next is a screw in shelf

I later found out i had to widen/chamfer the hole so the wires didn’t get cut by the sharp edge

After much head scratching on how i was going to make this work I added a spacer to the top side of the driver (soldered in place)

Next the bezel. I slotted the face of the bezel so it could be tightened with a thin bit of scrap metal. The wall thickness is real thin and i didn’t have lot to play with in the head so the thread is very fine to keep it small as possible. I made the threaded section extra long so there is less chance of stripping the fine thread.

Next the tail and switch. I can see now i didn’t take enough pics to show this clearly. The board is from a cheap host i bought a few years ago (in fact i don’t even remember what host it was???). I made a brass ring that threads into the tail. The ring is soldered to one pad on the top side of the board and isolated from the other. The ring is connected to battery (-) pad. A momentary switch is soldered between the 2 pads which activates the outer pad on the underside of the board. Not sure how much mansplaining i need to do here but basically when all is connected the outer host is grounded while the inner tube is on the mom switch.

Now for the speky part of the build :sunglasses:
I drilled out the eyes in the skull and desoldered 2 of the rgb leds from the Lume1 aux board. For wiring i used the enamel wire from an old broken cooler fan. The wire is hair thin and was pretty hard for me to work with since i was too scared of breaking it during the build.

Next i drilled a hole in the host to feed the enamel wires through. As luck would have it, the point where the wires come through on the inside is where the ID opens up a little and there is ample room for the wires to slide up between the inner tube and outer body. I wasn’t planning on it but i discovered i could feed the wires through the holes around the edge of the driver too.

So end result is a torch with illuminated skull eyes that are fully controllable with Andruil. I’ll get some more pics later. I still have one or two minor things to finish it off.

BTW this build has not been easy. Aside from the tiny soldering which i suck at on a good day, I had other things throw me for a loop like -
after assembling to the point of connecting the aux lights i found there was a short somewhere since it wouldn’t function properly. After much hair pulling I disassembled it to the point of inner tube and body and found that’s where the short was happening. It didn’t make sense to me as i had the inner tube wrapped in capton tape. I pulled the tape off and replaced it. I guess the edge of the tape scraped up some dust or swarf or something to short out to the body. I went through the process of all that tiny soldering again only to screw up one of the rgb contact pads so had to replace that led with another from the Lume1 aux board. In truth the project sat on my desk for a week because i was just putting off doing the soldering, yeh i hate it that much :confounded: I’ll leave my bitching at that, they were the main points :stuck_out_tongue: I’m super happy I got it done in the end :crown:

Panda...you crazy awesome maniac.

I love it!

Lol thanks id30. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been called that :smiley:

What else can be said except… WOW?

And I’m so proud when I do a simple LED swap ! Men… you are an artist. Congrats on this beautiful mod.

ok, I am not actually sure what I read/saw - but it looks amazing. congrats.

Awesome result! And those tiny wire problems would drive me crazy, I have ditched projects for less trouble than that :person_facepalming:

Amazing. I too put off tiny soldering projects (for months!) because I hate it.

Wow this is very impressive work!

That belongs in the BLF museum

I think Ol’ Lumens would be mighty complimentary of this fine craftsmanship and ingenuity. :+1: :beer:

Truly spectacular!

My jaw literally dropped when I realized what you’d managed here. Genuine art.

Bit early for the contest this year :wink:

In all seriousness, one heck of an impressive build. Now just never open it again for fear of messing something up, right?

What is going to be the main type of led emitter? Cool job, I too saw those clippers and thought they would make great hosts. Over my head though. But I’ve just ordered a Queko soldering iron to start with some basics.

WoW :+1:

Regards Xandre

On a side note I have one of these very cheap vintage hair trimmer they are incredibly good and powerful but they use cheap noname battery and you can’t use regular 18650 inside because its too long.

This is fantastic...nice work!!

Oh, that makes me feel at least a little better :blush:

Thanks nottawhack. May he RIP.

I can tell you speak from experience :face_with_monocle: The head is glued to the body :smiley:

Main leds (triple) are XPG 3300K 90CRI. Good luck with your modding journey, just beware there will be setbacks, everyone gets them :cowboy_hat_face:

Thanks for all the positive comments, cheers :beer: :beer:

On my L6 I had a damaged solder pad on the switch PCB and swore I’d never open the thing again for fear of damaging that. Well, eventually I went to flash Anduril on the thing, and sure enough the last little bit of that solder pad came flying off.

I’ve got new switch MCPCBs, just gotta get around to replacing it now…

Good job, it looks amazing! :slight_smile: :beer:

That truly is next level, PP. Very impressive. I can only imagine how tedious it was to get everything to fit together just right. I especially hate working with that tiny wire and hooking up those aux LEDs. I had a project earlier this year that the aux LED wiring would have had me pulling my hair out… if I had hair to pull out! :disappointed: