C20 build and DIY sinkpad screw up :) Finished with beamshots!

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

had to escape to the garage as the parents and kids were driving me spare. Instead of doing what I meant to do (continue building my milling attachment), I got distracted with my C20 pill.

Idea - 1) add some copper to the pill to make the bit under the LED (what’s that called?) thicker, as it looks barely 1mm thick as stock and 2) make a direct to copper sinkpad-pill bonanza megamod of the gods. Reality turned out a little different, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Raw materials

cutting out the blank

blank cut out (it’s about 1.8mm thick, so the pill will be almost 3x as thick) and in place

soldered in place with el trusty blow torch. First time doing this, but I’ve watched Old Lumens do it so many times I’m almost a pro :slight_smile:

pill and star drilled for wires

All in place with the 12G wires that are going to pop riveted in place between star and pill

hmm, this didn’t go so well. Pressing the wires in pushed the star off centre, then I soldered the wires in place, but the star was off centre. Then I tried reheating the pill to centre the star. Then one of the wires fell out. Then things started smelling bad.

time for star no. 2

this time I decided that Nightcrawl’s idea might be a better one and drilled/ filed out the centre pad of a new star. Some dremel work got the two wires sort of rectangular. Star didn’t sit flat because pressing one of the wires distorted the bit that the star sits on. Bah. Oh well, hopefully the wires’ll do the job instead.

back side

paste in place

some no. 4 on the hob later and…

I put some paste underneath the star for good measure, can’t hurt. Star is fixed in place and there aren’t any shorts, so I’m guessing it worked.

I’ll wire it up and test it later, fingers crossed. Build might not get done for a little while, but I’ll try and get it done sometime next week.

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I love these mods. Good luck for the next step.Wink

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Hack job! :D

I'd like to add that you dont need two wires. One in the center is enough, because that is where most heat is generated. The LED substrate under the dome is just about 1mm square and a solid copper wire already covers about 70% of the center heatpad surface.. also, its easier to use just one. ;)

4

That’s a cool build. I have a few hollow aluminum pills that I’d like to fill, but the solder method will not work. I guess pressing a piece of copper into the hole in the pill will help.

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Hey! Do yourself a HUGE favor and next time you're in the home improvement shoppe pick up a 3 piece set of tin snips, red green yellow (left, right, straight). Cut off a short piece of copper tubing, then slit it lengthwise with the snips and flatten it out, then trim it down to whatever rough shape and save the Dremel for final shaping. Those special cutoff wheels start to get expensive after a while.

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Also, after you have the tube flattened out, use a hole saw(they go down to 5/8” OD which yields an 11mm disc) to drill through a block of wood, clamp that over the copper and follow it through without the centering bit. Thanks for sharing your burnt toast. It’s important to know that things don’t always go to plan and extra parts are a necessity.

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all wise words for definite. I’d beat a path to Home Depot for some tin snips if I was doing more of these (I think I may even have some ancient ones somewhere), I just worked with what I had to hand at the time - same for hole saws, which would be seriously useful for a lot of things. I abuse/ misuse spade bits on a fairly regular basis, so I really should get some.

Nightcrawl - I take that as a complement :slight_smile: You know, I did start pondering the wisdom of drilling 2 holes about 1/2 way through, but it was too late by then :smiley: If I were to do it again, I’d definitely stick to just one hole. I might have a play with Comfychair’s more sensible method of just doing the start, I think that would work much better/ reliably.

Relic - if you get the disc to a smidgen too large, then stick the pill in the oven and spray the disc with a dustoff can held upside down, you should be able press them together for a good interference fit (with some thermal paste in between). I know of people who put driver compartment covers on that way. You’d have to be more accurate with a tool than I am though!

I’m still trying to decide whether to just flash the 2.1A Nanjg I have from FT with BLF-VLD or if I want to be more adventurous and swap out the Attiny13 for a 25, so I can start experimenting with the onboard thermistor. First option = functioning light within a few days (potentially), second option = better light within an unspecified but likely large amount of time. I also want to play with the OP reflector and a few TIR optics I have that look like they’ll fit.

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Great job! Using standard hand tools really ups the difficulty. It is so cool to see you attempting a new approach and documenting your failure and success. We learn from both. I have cooked a few bases myself trying to use torches. I now stick with the stove top where I can control the temp better. Someone (name escapes me at the moment) here gave me that idea by reflowing emitters on a glass cook top.

Thank you for the great pictures too. Learned a lot from this as I intend to try the first approach with wires on my ZY-T08.

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thanks! I think either Nightcrawl’s approach (drilling through the star and soldering the wire to the pill) or Comfychair’s method (pop rivet stars) are better ideas - trying to mix both of them proved too hard to do well, mostly because of the problems centering the star.

I use my stove top for reflowing too, although small stars are a pain as it’s very easy for them to fall through the bars into the pan underneath.

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Oh, I also like how you made that copper slug and put it in the pill to further disburse the heat. I bet it will work pretty good. Please keep us posted.

You might try wrapping some aluminum foil over the heating element and then a sheet of parchment paper on top of that. I use parchment paper on my glass top stove so that I can smoothly slide the emitter/base of the hot surface.

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glad you like it :slight_smile: My karma account must be overflowing because the day I thought about adding a copper disk to the pill I found that pipe cut off next to where I work. ChicagoX also offered some alu plate for the reflowing, which reminded me that I have some in my box of metal bits, so that should make reflowing less of a “is this going to end up in some crusty rice overflow or not” exercise. LEDs are just like buttered toast, they always end up emitter side down if you drop them onto something scummy.

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Yeah, if you try to drill the MCPCB, and then transfer that location to the base and drill that hole, with hand tools it just ain't gonna happen unless you get extremely lucky. Now if you had a lathe and could spin the MCPCB with the drill in the tailstock, and the same with the base, then making two perfectly centered holes is easy.

To get them aligned with stuff normal humans can afford (i.e.: not nitro ), you'll have to rig something up to clamp the two pieces together, and drill them both in one go, without either of them shifting. So you'll have to do some crafty fixturing. Not impossible, but with pieces this small it's not easy.

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yeah, I had a bear of a time trying to hold everything together to drill the holes and even then my shonky drilling skillz meant that the holes weren’t exactly where I wanted. If I were to do it again, I’d wait until my milling attachment is finished and throw a drill in to the chuck (I can’t put a drill chuck in my tailstock unfortunately). Still, it was fun and an adventure, so I’m happy.

Hopefully I’ll get time to hook it up and test it out tonight - last night was occupied by watching “A bridge too far” with my dad :slight_smile:

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so, I finally got off my furry butt and finished this light (ish).

First the tail cap, with o-ring for tailstanding (thank you whoever it was who told me about it) and copper braid, just because I wanted to try it out. A little bit of dialectric grease on the ground ring of the switch and threads of the retaining ring and that bit's done.

next, the driver/ pill. This was somewhat complicated by having a 2.1A mobydrv driver (which wouldn't work here) and a 1A lupodrv driver (which would, but wasn't enough current and no space for stacking chips). So, some sweat inducing soldering later, I swapped the ATtiny13 chips around.

Test wired

test battery

some lovely teflon wires attached (boy is that stuff lovely to work with)

driver spring "copper braided". No real reason to at the current levels this light is going to run at, but who cares?

driver soldered in place - I don't think it's going anywhere :)

the pill and some optics for testing. From left to right: LED-DNA 10deg, Osram something or other 4 deg optic from Fasttech, Ledil LC1 and stock OP reflector. All beam shots were done at 2s (lawn) or auto-exposure (garage wall), so the lawn ones should be comparable for brightness and the garage wall ones are really just for beam shape.

Control

Ledil LC1

LED-DNA optic

Osram something or other

stock OP reflector. It didn't go down very far, so the LED wasn't fully into the opening, which may affect the beam somewhat

not the best beamshots admittedly, but they should give you some idea :) I ended up going with the LED-DNA optic in the end - it was noticeably brighter than the other two TIR optics and has a lovely smooth beam, while still throwing far enough for my uses. I wasn't too impressed with the Osram one, gave a weird square mid spill (so circular spot>square>circle) which made the close in beam ringy. One really neat thing about this torch is that the o-ring in the head means that I skipped the lens and still got a good seal between the head and optic.

The head gets lovely and toasty hot quickly on high, so the thermal shenanigans seem to be doing their job. Lovely Chomerics paste between the pill and head helps noticeably, and with some between the head and battery tube the tube warms up too (just lags behind the head). Cools down quickly as well. Even got to use it last night too, to help my wife give my daughter her nebuliser in the middle of the night. I haven't had time to program the driver to drop the blinky and one of the modes, but I'll get round to that before going camping this weekend.

All in all a lovely little light that I'm very happy with, all for ~$22.

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Its good to see you finish your mod Mr muppet. Does Mrs muppet like your new light?

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thanks! It took long enough :slight_smile: Mrs Muppet likes my light very much, but she can’t have it as she’s already stolen my Nichia 219 modded RC-G2. Which was my excuse for making this light, so I sort of “suggested” she steal it :smiley:

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Thanks for the update and comparison shots. The yard shots kind of look like the light is coming down from up in the air. Like an alien spaceship is hovering over your yard. At least that is how it looks when they visit me.

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I do get some funny comments from the neighbours, that’s for sure :slight_smile: If aliens did come to this planet, I’d hope they’d have LED running lights at the very least :cowboy_hat_face: