Ever since I first used light with an attached diffuser, I realized that for everyday tasks it’s just… better. From moving around a house at night to looking inside industrial equipment, it’s really nice to not have to worry about where exactly the light is pointing and have broad area illumination instead.
Downside is, there’s not a lot of existing options for attachable diffusers, and especially not ones that have a half-decent fit.
So I decided to print my own.
It has a concave inner cone design similar to the (injection-molded) Fenix diffusers. This gives more side-spill and a compact shape that can headstand. I don’t need headstanding, but the compactness is nice.
Printed in semi-flexible TPE, so there’s a lot of squish rather than brittleness. The elasticity also lets me use a half millimeter or so of interference fit so the diffuser is nice and snug.
Beamshot comparison. There’s still quite a bit of light directed forward which I find nice for things like nighttime walks. There’s also some faint irregularity around the edges which is less than ideal but in practice isn’t very noticeable.
Took me about eight or nine revisions to get something I was happy with. I’m still tweaking print settings a bit, trying to get rid of those faint radial shadows.
Parametric CAD made it trivial to print one for my buddy’s Fenix PD35, which was pretty neat since the new version of their first-party diffusers doesn’t fit very well.
I could probably print these for any 18650 or 21700 based lights with a reasonably sized and cylindrical front bezel. Is that a thing folks would be interested in?
I 3dprinted a diffuser for the SP36 a few years back, by editing an existing model in thingiverse. I measured the diameter of the SP36 with my calipers, and after three tries, I had a diffuser that fit snugly. It transformed my SP36 into a very useable lantern, and I held of buying a LT1 because of it.
hmm, dunno if this is a Me Problem but all of those links immediately redirect to the thingiverse home page. Dunno what’s up with that.
Anyway I had looked around a fair bit at existing printed diffusers, and none were quite what I wanted
As for releasing the .stl, I might be down for it but I’m still having a big think about whether I might want to actually sell these. Right now there’s only a few folks selling printed diffusers so I suspect that there might be some demand? I may end up doing something along the lines of posting an exported .stl for one or two different lights/sizes, but holding on to the source CAD and offering the service for arbitrary dimensions or folks who don’t want to mess with printers.
Yes, I agree. Those are very, very convinient. Namely i have the Akai next to my bed, but there are no new lanterns from this caliber to be bought. I have started a topic a few months ago.
