I had someone ask me about headlamps and my reply was that I’m not that interested in playing around with them as there are a number of good headlamps available. After some circumstances that I won’t go into I’ve decided to ‘take the challenge’. I realize some of you may ask “why make a hotrod?” and my answer is I wanted to make something that seemed to standout amongst the commercially available products.
Parts I planned to use were TA driver with narsil from Lexel, triple luxeon 4000k from Led4power, some kinda pc heatsink that’s been kickin around my shed for ages and I bought a headlamp just for the strap and battery box. Headlamp
I started with a block of aluminium. (nevermind the straight cut :person_facepalming: )
I lathed it flat but did something (I don’t remember what) and ruined the first block.
I made the second attempt out of ~8mm plate. I’m pretty sure it’s 6061 aluminium.
After cutting it out I milled out the guts
….and the family calls.
To be continued…
Edit: back again
Switch parts
Thermal glued the driver and star to the heatsink
I also tried to make a pattern on the face of the light but it didn’t turn out quite as I hoped. I screwed up the direction of the knurl so now the vertical and the horizontal lines are angling the same direction, I wanted opposing directions :person_facepalming:
I cut some ‘wings’ to fit in the headband
I weighed the ingredients and was surprised to find it was lighter than the original light
Button test
Power in
I got to this point and realised I should have run the power in through heatsink so I could solder easily and ensure good wiring.
Stuffed in like sardines
A quick test on the power supply and it sucks all the amps it can get :smiling_imp: I’ll have to be careful with this one
The battery box also needs upgrading so hopefully I’ll get time this weekend to finish this project :disguised_face: