Just Got My LT1.... Thoughts.

[Scallywag]

@Firelight2

LT1 is a great lantern.

But I do wonder if it was really necessary to have the LED and giant chunk of metal at the top of the light.

Suppose the LED was mounted in the bottom of the light like a traditional flashlight and all the shroud contained was a cylindrical diffuser plus a lightweight conical reflector at the top to divert the light sideways into the diffuser and partially downward. The diffuser wouldn’t even need to be a separate piece… just use frosted plastic for the shroud:

• The heatsink above the shroud would be unnecessary so the center of gravity of the lantern would be much lower.

• The lantern also would have been able to use much of the head and body tube for heatsinking so less overall mass would be needed. The light would probably weigh less.

• It might even be possible to unscrew and remove the shroud and use the light like a conventional flashlight or mule giving added functionality.

I know at this point the thread is a bit long to go through, but DBSAR went through a lot of iterations. The “conical reflector at the top” and variations thereof have been done to death and he wasn’t getting the performance (not necessarily in terms of light output as we traditionally use the term, but in terms of glare and light angles) out of those configurations that he wanted.

That said, it seems like he came up with something interesting for the LT1 Mini that uses TIRs on the bottom and a flat mirror on the top. It does kind of make me wonder if something like that would have worked better for the LT1? Certainly a configuration with LEDs on the bottom would have provided for a much higher thermally stable output, as evidenced by other soda-can lights like the BLF Q8.