Excellent built. Wish I have your skill and patience. 
Thanks! This is a culmination of so much information I've learned from the great people of this forum. Without BLF, I would have never got to this point. So it is all of you that I owe thanks too. H)
*RESPECT*
Love the clean finish, I am VERY impressed by what you have achieve, and the attention to detail. Makes me want to do some more custom work!
Well done!
Wow .
Just ......Wow .
Excellent work and how-to complete with great pictures .
The culmination of a lot of thought and hard work .
Very impressive , thanks for sharing .
WOW man, I didn't know you had such skills with the power tools, The electronics i knew you had those skills tho. :) Plus you put alot of thought and science into your design, Id just JB weld a copper tube to a reflector and glue it into place. Man thats sad.....
Now i just gotta start begging you to make me some heavy duty P60 slugs from copper, Or help me find a $50 lathe! lol But then again ill need new hosts that are more heavy duty to disperse all that absorbed heat. Man this hobby is just one big series of upgrading until what you have left is just a handmade light.
Well it would be if i had the tools and skills anyhow. Luckily im limited too electronics.
Thanks again guys. This has been a long time coming. My earlier work with this aspheric proves out pretty well. With the light 3 feet from the wall, I get a beam just over a yard wide. This confirms the expected 50 degree well dispersed cone angle I was expecting. With the spill to the edges, it is an easy 60 degree cone. I removed the red film for the following shots.
Here are some beam shots: XM-L T6 LCK LED XMLAWT-00-000-0000T6051 WHITE
1/60-second exposure, f2.8, 36" to the wall:
Control
Low: ~50ma
Med: ~300ma
Hi: ~1A
Video of the modes to follow.
Very impressive. I sure wish I had your skills. :)
Let's see if I can embed the vid. Warning, it is seriously boring!
Well, what do you know... 17-modes! :|
Group 1: Low/Medium/High = 3 modes
Group 2: Low/Medium/High/Fast Strobe/Police Strobe/0.33Hz Flash/1 Hz Flash/10 Second Beacon/SOS = 9 modes
Group 3: Low/Medium/High/Fast Strobe/SOS = 5 modes
3+9+5 = 17 modes.
Yes, this is exactly the same as the driver I got from DX
Do you have a picture of your lathe? I was looking at the chuck and I noticed some marks on the jaws (oops?) and then I realised that the lathe was a cutie...
Hahaha... a lathe without marks is an unused lathe 0:)
This is a Emco Unimat 3 that my dad got me several hobbies ago.
Very nice work!
I think this is worth posting.
Why I choose the XM-L over the XP-G. This treatise only applies to a very under-driven XM-L using 3x AMC7135 for 1050ma to the emitter. This seems to be the "sweet spot" for the XM-L driven by 1x Li-Ion cell.
From Cree's datasheets, it is very apparent that the XM-L will stay in regulation a lot longer than the XP-G in single cell Li-Ion applications. We must remember to account for the voltage drop across the AMC7135 devices but overall, the XM-L will remain at a constant brightness almost until the NANJG driver hits the low voltage alarm (nice feature). Depending on the 1A curve of your particular battery, the XP-G could start dimming half way through the charge. Driver input voltage for the AMC7135 driver will be around 3.1V when the emitter sees 3V based on a 1050ma draw. At 3.1V, a cell with a sharp knee will dump rather quickly. The protection circuit kicks in at about 2.9V.
This is not to say that the XP-G doesn't have a place in the flashlight realm, but it is probably served best with a buck driver with 2 or more cells, or with a drivers that will actually maintain constant current and boost the voltage of a low charge on a single cell. I haven't found that driver yet. With the quality and the simplicity of the NANJG drivers available for single Li-Ion lights, it is hard to get excited about qualifying more drivers.
Other great features of the NANJG drivers: Memory; groups; and they maintain their mode through a single transient (<- this is an important feature!); Adaptability to higher or lower output currents.
Red data is the XM-L data; the solid blue is XP-G data while in regulation; the dotted blue is the XP-G when the emitter is at 3V where the XM-L is still in regulation.
Nice work!
Such a TINY lathe!! Love it!! Something that doesn't take an hour to clean up! ITS SOO CUTE!!! OMG!
My late grandfather bought a Myford Super 7 for his live steam hobby, and I now use it for things here and there. A chinese lathe can be bought for 1/10 the cost of the british lathe, but this old british lathe still out cuts the chinese lathes simply due to outright quality. Not many more features than yours, but it does the job!
I finally went through a runtime test.
With Rev Jim's 2350mah Panasonic cells, I got 11+ hours of runtime in the police strobe mode.
The brightness remained completely constant until it went into the driver's alarm mode (low output blinking)
That is HUGE.
Interesting. Makes me want to own a lathe. Did some research and found out that i have to learn a ton before fiddling and finding the right one. It seems a novice selflearning wannabe lathe expert can hurt himself pretty easily and pretty hard. In the end i will not bother with, and go the usual free shipping route even if i dont't get what i want from the usual suspects. DIY parts are getting annoying. Always the same stuff. If occasionally some1 gets something new 90% of the time is junk or heavily overpriced.
I would really love to do my own flashlights. Even a few for sale. Basiacally, good drivers, optics, sweet tolerances, reliability and a strong aesthetic factor.
I like:
Not exactly my style but you get the idea.
Thanks for sharing! This makes me wish I had some more time to use my lathe! (and learn how to use it 
Really a great job expecially for build quality!
Thanks. This light is certainly meant to be a very robust flashlight, it has to be.
Manual lathes are only good for little fiddly bits. You don't get to make threads, you don't get precision CNC control for repeatability, and every tool you need to add costs more than new flashlights. I am happy to have this unit with the basic minimum of accessories but I wouldn't take on a whole new light on it. But I might take the time to actually design the "perfect" flashlight using CAD. CAD doesn't try to remove your fingers or put holes in your walls. Now if only there wasn't so much competition in this endeavor :tired:
It is easy to make 1000 flashlights from a home brew design. Once you got it on paper, a 1000 units can be had pretty cheap. It is your personal quality control that will make these better than any other light out there if the design is solid and the prints are accurate. Unless you plan to do this as a business however, you will never make a dime for your time and effort. The lucky ones break even.
I'd -like- to fill a niche market with this effort. The light is too big to market. But the concept is solid. And I know the need and interest is there. But I have more work to do.