Finally my reserved 5A tint D80 BLF Special Edition arrived today! 
What a real beauty and a nice creamy tint! 
…and the BEST:
Soshine 2900 anode protected cells fit and can
deliver the power to really light up this dragster!
Cheers! 
to all organizers!
The 5A tint is definitely my preference over 3C. Been messing with all 3 tints. You either get a beam (1A), or good colors (5A), and while a dense beam looks great, the 5A is more useful in the woods for me. Even a dedomed 5A looks good! (Contrary to popular belief.)
On the reflector focusing, a reflector, unlike a lens, has 1 place, and 1 place only where all marginal rays collimate to a point (if shined in from the front from a light bulb at a distance away of 5 meters or so, you can see this easily). Blues don’t have a different focal point than reds with a reflector, as they do with lenses. This is what made the reflecting telescope such a popular design over the refracting telescope, I.E., image quality, due to lack of aberration.
Ok. Thanks. I’m going to try the 5 meters thing. Not sure what I will see but that’s part of the fun:)
Krono, I may have missed the announcement that the longer tube was available- and maybe it isn’t it- but, do you know if this is indeed the longer tube?
If it is, can we order them now, or are we supposed to wait for some reason?
Thanks.
This should be the longer one. The one that came with the D80 has 10 “knurling-rings” and this newer one has 11.
Well it should work on an aluminum reflector -- I think. I'm sure material thickness and other attributes will impact the effectiveness - I really don't know much on metal properties and metal tools, or used this tool enough to answer this type of question. My poor educated guess would be yes for copper in some circumstances, but brass being harder, might be more difficult.
What I mean is this. If you have a set of parallel “=” rays from a point source, and they aim into the reflector at 0° to the reflector center axis, no matter where the parallel rays strike whether it be half of the diameter, the edge of the diameter (marginal rays), or even down near the LED on the reflector curvature, the rays will ALL reflect off the surface and create a point in the dead center of the reflector. This would be an optimally designed perfect reflector. As you can imagine, if all those rays from different points on the reflector bend so that they land at the center, if you were to continue through the reflector hole, they would be expanding, growing larger and larger away from a point into a ring. Because the reflector is designed so that all rays land at the center, when you use a die like the XHP70, there is nothing making light in the center of the LED, and being that the reflector works forwards as it does backwards (direction of light travel) this means no light is going to leave from the area in the center, which is why the donut hole occurs.
Reflectors have been designed to break-up this problem by using surfaces which aren’t perfect, but not as far as an orange peel, to help aid LEDs which do not have light coming from their very center.
Since in real life it is very hard (impossible) to find a true point source of light, a light bulb at a few meters away will create a tiny dot of light, smaller and smaller, dimmer and dimmer, as distance grows between them, helping aid to see what I’m talking about. If you can never achieve a tiny dot, but you can achieve a small ring, the reflector is either too close, or too far from the LED. However, what I have described is simply the best way to see the principle in action. The best way to setup the light, is to physically change the distance of the assembled reflector in the light from the LED surface, and watch the effect this has on focus. I simply 3D print spacers at different heights, or turn metal off the base of the reflector, instead of grinding the spacers.
Yes…this is definitely the longer tube. Karen has been entering them into the system, so I am not sure they are available for purchase yet. Go ahead and give it a try!
It is black, not grey
??
It might be a darker color. There are always color differences between batches.
Description says BLACK...not GRAY. I'd expect no match at all unless they clarify.
I will get some clarity from May.
Thanks for the reply(ies).
Any mods for single XHP/XPL-HI emitter?
The plastic centering piece is for XM-L size leds, and the trick placing the XP-sized XP-L diagonally in the opening does not work because the centering piece opening is not square but round. So for XP-L you need a different centering piece. But the reflector opening of the D80 is an unusual diameter, so no common XP centering pices will fit. Without a centering piece the centering of the led will be a pain, at least in my mods I stopped trying that.
Ergo, XP-size leds are a very bad idea for the D80 unless someone comes up with a clever solution (like fitting some centering piece inside the centering piece).
Dale's reflector that he used for the MTG2 would probably work. It's in here somewhere:)
Guys, I make the rings, see below:
They snap right on.
Nice! 3D-printed?