I have a test jig for drivers and flashlights. I have an LED mounted on a heat sink on the jig. I have destroyed 2 LED’s so far, because the LED is unprotected. I am hoping someone here could print me a snap on cover for the LED. The dimensions of the heat sink are 4mmX4mmW2.5mm. I could cut a groove in 2 of the sides or remove a couple of the fins for the cover to snap into. I will pay you for your efforts and shipping.
!
Thanks Matt
Hi Matt,
You’d have to be very specific about the design for someone to follow through. How are the emitters being destroyed? What is the function of this snap on cover? To retain the star?
The plastic cover would simply sit over the top of the heat sink and LED and protect it from damage. I travel with the jig often and it is in a tool box. I had de-domed them and broken the bond wires twice so far. the star is retained by the 2 nuts on the top side. So basically, the cover would snap over the top side and would have 5/16th of an inch above the LED open on the inside and 2 slots to let the wires out the side. I just envision a little box that snaps on the top and protects things. Since the sink is 4mmX4mm the cover would have a ledge around the inside that would leave an opening inside about 3.5mmX3.5mm and prevent crushing. I could try and make a rough sketch and take a picture of it…
I see. You mean 40mm x 40mm x 25mm I think.
So this is an interesting design challenge. The “design specification” demands clips, which means the designer needs to have a feel for the properties of the design material. The clips need to be of a specific thickness and length in order to be appropriately rigid. The designer also needs to intuit the shape of the clip itself based on the photo. There are 10 fins on the side of the heatsink visible in the photo. To achieve symmetry, the clip will need to cover the space of either two or four of those fins. It seems to me that clips on two sides of the heatsink would be more cooperative than clips on all four sides, and with only two clips, and being made from plastic, they should be strong… so the clips should take up the space of about four fins.
The picture is crooked but I rotated it slightly and scaled it to a 40mm x 40mm x 25mm heatsink model in order to approximate the width of the clip relative to four fins. Orthographic photographs are helpful for a designer. A photo taken directly from the side or top is a tool from which to build a model, even when there is no exact scale in the photo. An isometric photo (like from an above corner perspective) is good as well to reveal more of the character of the shape.
Anyways that’s what I came up with. It’s designed with radii on the features so that it could be either machined or 3d printed. It would be better if it had a lip that braced the sides and corners of the heatsink but it would need to conform pretty well to the true size of the heatsink in that case. I can give you that CAD model in whatever file format you need if you want it. If you provide a photo of your heatsink taken directly from the side I can double check the width of the clips relative to the fins.
Kloepper Knife Works announced he has a new 3d printer. Said he got it 1 month ago but didn’t announce any test results or anything in the thread. My experience with 3d printed items is that they aren’t all that “functional” but hey, maybe you’ll manage to get something that won’t immediately snap in half.
Jeeeez Hoop………. that is Cooool……Kudos
I would have to build it out of wood and velcro…… but Im a carpenter not an engineer
Bit of a problem when he wants it to have clips. Isn’t it? :laughing:
Mattlward, do you have a hot air gun? Hot air reflow, paint stripper or anything. You could just make a cover out of a thermoplastic sheet like kydex. There is also polymorph for molding shapes but for this I’d just go for a thermoplastic sheet. Lots of videos on youtube.
~ edit ~
Or just wood like Coscar suggests. 
Why don’t you just have four small posts screwed into each corner of the heatsink and some clear polycarbonate over the top? The polycarbonate would screw down into the post’s, or a piece of thin aluminium.
+1
Holy crap… I did not expect this many replies over night. And so many good ideas!
Hoop, that is exactly what I was thinking about… But maybe that is way to complex. I do work in wood, had thought about doing it that way but the velcro attach is just so half* for my OCD. You know, velcro is for cables!
Andrew, I may have to try that idea… Had not thought of just leaving the cover in place! Not much to drill and tap, but a set of them a few mm tall would work just fine! I think I will do it this way!
Halo, I do have kydex, That thought had crossed my mind, I make a few holsters with it but am not sure I could get the precise bends and folds right for a snap on cover.
Thanks Guys, that is what I love about this place, there are so many different ideas regarding ways to tackle a problem.
I like this idea.
I like it as well, I would like to find some dark tinted plastic. I always momentarily blind myself with the open LED. But for now, I may paint it black and leave a small clear aperture in the center to verify that the LED is on and to see mode changes.
I did just that for a garage tasklight/ emergency light I made years ago. It’s been dropped from 6ft up onto concrete and even catapulted off a control arm by a driveshaft and it’s still totally fine. I can’t remember if I glued the perspex onto the standoffs or screwed it on, but either way, it’s super robust.
Admittedly I have a slight bias against 3d printed stuff. haha. It would be interesting to see how it held up. There are many types of 3d printing processes and many types of printable plastics.
I’m glad that the complexity of designing and then 3d printing or machining something, which might seem simple, is apparent. I did the hard part of the 3D printing process if you ask me, but no matter, I was just indulging myself anyway.
Design takes real thought, “mental work,” which is something most people aren’t used to doing, and I don’t mean that in a cynical way. It’s just not necessary to put much thought into most daily tasks, for instance. I think many people even develop an aversion to doing mental work. It is, after all, work. Design is is essentially complex problem solving. It takes just sitting there and thinking and thinking and thinking…. Not that I had to do that in the case of this plastic cover, I am just pontificating. When I design… I will sit and stare at things, sometimes for hours, sometimes dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds of hours, and just think and think about all of the various approaches the design could take, and after so long, and after the various approaches start to meld into one another, I decide on an actionable plan to manufacture the thing. But I have hangups in the process. I am only now learning how to incorporate prototypes into the process of design as I go, rather than trying to get it entirely right in CAD before I start on the first prototypes. That’s my aversion to work messing with the process, I think… because the cad stuff is generally less tedious than machining the physical object. So I’ll revise the cad, and revise some more. It is impractical to get it just right in cad before making the prototypes, but it is a valuable skill to get pretty close, because sometimes as a machinist, when a customer wants something made and needs it to work on the first go, it is necessary to get it pretty close to perfect on the first shot. There may never be another revision. Gotta stake your name on the first and only.
It would be cool to buy something like this! And a programing kit with everything you need? What better market than BLF? :money_mouth_face: Need one of those auto darkening lenses over the emitter.?