Heat test take 2. Here we go. Trying to make this as scintific as a kinda drunk Aardvark Spleen can make it.
I taped off the buttons because I figured it’d be hard to clean the plastidip out of the button. I kept them all in this order, left to right. (ssx6, alx6, cux5, alx5)
14500 HOT off the charger
Battery for the ss/cu x6:
Batt for the al x6:
For the cu x5:
Al x5:
Ready to rock
ssx6 - alx6
cu - al
And we’re off!
1 minute - I moved the lights over a bit, the funny orbs are the heat in the table:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
2 minutes:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
3 minutes:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
4 minutes:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
5 minutes:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
6 minutes:
ssx6 - alx6
cux5 - alx5
The x5’s side by side, cu top:
The x6’s side by side, cu/ss top:
There’s more that I’ll type up later. I hope I didn’t make any errors.
Thanks for the thermal data. I have bookmarked it.
Do you know if the measurements will be different when the lights are tail-standing? It seems like some heat would get trapped when they are positioned head-down during the test.
Just received my box set (waiting / standby list - purchased on 08-Feb) today. The flashlights are the most beautiful flashlights I ever have, although there are some marks here and there on the Cu-X5 set and the box. Thank you all.
Unluckily my SS-X6 has a bad reflector which is not properly polished :-((
I am trying to get BG to send me a replacement reflector.
Comparing the Cu and Al X5s — reading the image colors — the battery tubes (and presumably batteries) warm up faster on the copper light?
Or am I reading that wrong?
Thank you Aardvark Spleen! Exactly what I expected, the temperature readings and heat distribution settle so many discussions. What an incredible post. You should make a new thread and it should be stickied. Thanks again.
Hm, this suggests to me that having bigger heat radiator surface at the hot end, separated from the battery tube by a little ring/collar/spacer of (low-conducting) stainless steel, would keep batteries cooler — which seems to me more and more a good idea, as lights get hotter and batteries get more energy-dense in the future.
I keep thinking of those big heat radiator fins on the 1950s ray guns and wondering how much better flashlights could be at throwing away heat.
Well, the boiling water bath and steam whistle, eventually, would also work.
i thought you were just kidding when you said you painted your lights black and had cleaned them off already and lost the data. but it was true.!! are you going to see how fast they cool down compared to unpainted ? if black paint emits more heat than bare metal, the painted lights should be cooler than the unpainted lights when running on turbo.
we also need bare alum lights to test against the black ano lights.
how did you take the temperature ? with an IR gun ? what does an IR gun measure?
does it measure surface temp, or the heat which is being radiated off of the surface,
which would be affected by the emissivity of the materials, and would mean that the temperatures measured were not the actual surface temps. i have 2 IR guns and the “owners manuals” refer to this heat emission off of the tested surface.
Also demonstrates nicely why it’s so hard to do copper braid spring bypasses without turning the copper into a solid chunk of solder. The entire thing heats up instead of just a small part.
It appears that the aluminum X5’s tube might actually be a little warmer than the copper X5’s tube. The colors aren’t shown on an absolute scale so colors in one picture can’t be compared to another… but when both lights are in the same picture the colors can be compared.
The orange shades go much farther down the battery tube on the aluminum model than on the copper one.
I just had that play in my head like a video, watching the solder go from solid to wicking up the whole stupid braid. So much solder saturated copper braid in trash cans, lol.
