But don't throw in the towel yet I just went through a humbling experience myself I *used to be able" to due basic mechanical work ie oil changes and transmission fluid changes yeah well used to I treid to change the transmission fluid and filter on my wifes car yesterday well after a trip to dealership and 650.00 $ less out of my wifes check we finally got the car back with new pan gasket and shifter cable I accidentally cracked I know how the frustration feels like b ut sometimes we hit a platue or a wall and we just need to tak e a short break and clear the head and when were ready go back and try, try again heck I wish I had a minute amount of k knowledge and experience that you have also anyone who says they never made any mistakes has never tried to do anything! Keep your head up .
Crap.
Doh
Bugger. You cant win em all. Was it a big hammer? There was a certain driver that met its fate from another member here with one of these at times useful tool recently.
Yeah, my hammer’s name is “Crap”.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
Would love to hear the epic story of the road to ruin. Might save me from having to find a dumpster of my own. Like the MT-G2 in my K3, now de-domed and emitting lavender colored light. Might salvage that with a filter to color correct, might not. Will probably take it all apart and try to re-flow another emitter onto the mass of copper.
Oh well. Even my super-hero track star cousin is feeling the agony of defeat this weekend. He went to Colombia running for Team USA in Medellin at the PanAm Games. After 8 events in the 10 event Decathlon and looking like a good chance to win the thing, he pulled a hamstring clearing 15’ 9” in the pole vault. He’s out. 
DooDoo happens. We move on.
I still have many reminders of past failed projects lying around. Many hours and many dollars were invested in them and yet, there they sit. Funny how time seems to take away the agitation and frustration they caused. They don’t even bother me now.
It's fairly easy, it was all just mistakes in judgment and lack of good judgment. All of it could have been avoided and should have been avoided, if I had been thinking properly. That's what is happening is that I don't think properly lately. The thought process isn't there. It's just a fact of life and there's no fix for it.
The copper heat sink was tight in the head. That's fine, I wanted it tight. I put it in and then I put the leds on the TIRs in and used AA on the led stars. Sat it all down in and used some pressure on it while it dried. That's all fine and good. Then I had to get the top plate with the TIRs out again. Well, there's a problem. It's down in the head and there's no clearance, so I can't pry it out from the top. Ok, well I will just tap the whole thing out from the bottom. That will work.... Except when the copper heat sink does not come out straight and comes out cocked at an angle. Then it shears off all the leds and breaks the TIR bases.
Well, I can recover from that, but I need to make the copper fit a little looser, so I won't have it cock at an angle any more. I should remove more material from the copper heat sink OD, but it's such a pain in the ass trying to remove material from the outside of a circle, with a dremel bit, compared to removing material from the inside of a circle, so I went ahead and removed "just a little more" from the ID of the head. Oh, well, now I can see daylight, too bad, so sad. If I only had done it all the correct way, the hard way, the "it takes more time way", then it would have been fine.
Hindsight is 20/20 and no I did not even use a hammer on the stuff afterward, I was too depressed.
Clarke’s Three Laws are three “laws” of prediction formulated by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.
H. Stanley Judd
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.
Samuel Beckett
The original modder!
Thomas said when asked about his failures during his quest to invent a working light bulb.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
When you say that “I can see daylight”, do you mean you cut all the way through the head (made a hole in the side of the head)?
Or did you mean that the copper disk is too small now?
Pics?
I think OL was clear enough not to need to drag any more out but having read posts from lathe owners where even closer tolerances are sought the possibility of failure still exists and has pretty much the same consequences. Failure is way less fun than success but both serve to educate and I read “failure” threads with at least as much interest as the successful ones. I know of no other modder on this forum with the perseverence and dedication to produce the shear volume of work as OL let alone with his creativity. His presence here is (and I hope continues to be) a gift to all of his fans whether in a how to or in a how not to thread.
I doubt anything I can write will take the sting out of this but I learn from every thread you post OL.
Sorry to hear about this, but I don't understand a couple of things.
1. Trying to increase the flashlight's throat evenly with a Dremel seems much more difficult than clamping the copper heat sink and taking it down with a strip of sandpaper, giving it a quarter turn every so often. That seems much easier, and likely to keep it round. Just because you have a Dremel doesn't mean you can't use other tools.
2. Why throw it all away? From the point where you say "Well, I can recover from that...", the only further mishap was opening the throat too much. Why not heat the copper disk and coat the edge with solder to increase the diameter? Or solder a copper strip wrapped around the edge if you need more thickness.
It's a hobby, if you get get into a sticky situation, set it down and go have a nice cup of tea, walk the dog, in desperate times even chat with the wife, ask if she wants to go shopping.
Thats sucks, a pretty big loss in terms of a light. I’ve had days when nothing goes right and parts hit the garbage can. last night was one. 2 different emitters on sinkpads, both garbage.
As everyone said I was talking about stock. The main issue was the heatsinking on this……
It’s hard to describe, or put into words, but there was an area that I needed to open up more, so the heat sink would fall into position better and it’s kind of like removing a lip to a lower level. I’m not going to dig it out for photos, so rest assured it cannot be fixed or I would have fixed it.
I see, thank for elaborating. I do stupid things all the time. Fortunately, after a day or two I can't remember them. 
I just made a heat sink from a couple pieces of copper soldered together. After watching OLs videos, with his grizzled fingers, hand shaping his discs into perfect rounds the old fashioned way, I bought tin snips and files and shaped and rounded my heat sink by hand. After a lot of sweat, toil, and destroyed fingernails I was so proud of my copper circle. I wanted to be just like Old-Lumens.
Now I find he’s using Dremels and drill presses after I did all that work, and my new rotary tool was just four feet away…unused. Next I’ll find out there’s no Easter bunny.