I had this dive light and didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t particularly bad (maybe except for poor heatsinking) but it wasn’t particularly good at any point either. Anyway somehow I came up with this brainy idea of using just the body and tail to make a smaller light. I thought I took more pictures of this light but now I look there doesn’t appear to be much :person_facepalming: I’ll take more when I get it finished.
I epoxied a mom switch to a fet driver. Drilled a hole in the now head to take the ‘button’. Made a copper washer that soldered to the driver for ground contact. Machined a thread into the head to take the retaining ring as well as cut off some of the anodizing under the star. The retaining ring was taken from inside the old head. Carclo optics. Fet driver (15% 100%) quad T-pad, now xpl hi
Initially it was a quad xpg3 but for some reason the driver wasn’t functioning. As soon as the battery was connected it would turn on high. I stuffed around for ages trying to work it out. Eventually the leds turned blue… then dark. I fitted xlp hi and resoldered the switch wires to the driver and all seems to be functioning ok now. I just need to make up a tail cap for it.
I thought it was a good idea at the time. After frying the xpg3’s I changed it for a bit of silicon wire. I was 99% sure it had nothing to do with the driver acting strange but didn’t like the possibility of what you mentioned RBD.
Stock light -
1 - I don’t dive and
2 - a cool host means little if the thermal path is poor
My mod
1 - I called it a finger sizzler because I kinda did let it get a bit hot when I was trying to figure out what was going on with the driver.
2 - It has no turbo timer or thermal regulation, a light this size and power probably should
After lathing I took it over to the drill press. The picture shows a router bit in the chuck but I didn’t end up using it. I tried a couple of different bits and ended up drill a good portion of the material out before trying to mill it out. It was slow work and I found out how much slop the drill press really has. I would like to have gone deeper but it was hard enough as it was trying not to break the bits (yes I broke one).
Anyhow the finish didn’t come up as neat as I was hoping so I did a little hand work to tidy it up.
The base of the milled area was a terrible finish and I wasn’t about to finish that by hand so I cheated and covered it up
Compared to a DQG. As you can see there is a small hole that I need to block up near the switch and it’s all done :partying_face:
I took the lens off to get a pic of the front too.
No it was more about the flex. The bits with a flat end like the router bit would try to wander. When I changed over to the thinner burr type bits they didn’t wander as much but of course, they can’t take as much sideways pressure. That’s how I snapped one. So as I mentioned it was really slow going.
If I ever try something like this again I think I’ll try set it up on the lathe.
I finalized this light today. I blocked up the lanyard hole near the switch by using a leather hole punch to make a round rubber dot from a bicycle tube. I stuffed the rubber dot into the hole then filled the remainder with 2 part epoxy mixed with a little black biro ink. The end result isn’t too bad. You can still see it but it doesn’t stand out too much.
Yeh, fresh cut copper is nice. I probably should have sourced some brass to try and match the colour of the lens bezel. :heart_eyes:
I got a quick beam shot with my phone tonight. Comparing to a DQG that I modded with a quad xpg2 S3 1C and khatod optic. Finger cooker is left DQG right in all pics.
Sizzler on low (15%), DQG on high
Sizzler on high (100%), DQG on turbo
As you can see the output is big on the sizzler but the tint is really cool. Of course, it heats up in no time on high so it is just a wow light on high. Low has plenty of usable light and I really should have gone for a third mode and temp regulation for this particular light so whoever ends up with this light from the raffle please be careful not to cook your fingers :smiling_imp:
