Thanks, Shimey! I have a small length of 22mm copper rod I got from my bud Wayne and sliced off a piece from it. I then had to turn it down to about 18.6mm by hand in a sanding drum on my drill press until it fit past the threads in the head. Had to keep dunking it in water to cool it off. My fingers hurt for a couple days after that. I think it was worth it but if I was to do it again I’d have a machinist turn down the stock for me.
That noctigon you linked to is the one you want. I-O sells it and has pics showing how to jumper it for serial or parallel. The driver is the 17mm FET driver with 1 minute stepdown from high.
In that case I’ll follow your lead on that. Thanks for the info. And thanks again for posting up the build. I’m pretty sure it can goad me into action through jealousy!
I too have the parts to make something like this but was going to use O-L’s method of sandwiching layers of copper disks and soldering them…but your solid copper is much better!
Wammo blammo powerhouse pocket rocket! some poor schmuck will be all like, “yeah this is just another flashlight” till he touches it off and it singes his retinas
I dub it the “Mac Daddy Jr.”
Awesome build!
Just wait till someone gets a few XP-L’s on these things!!!
“…. the best design is to have a copper baseplate on the bottom of your aluminum heatsink to transfer the heat away from your CPU quickly. Then the aluminum transfers the heat a little more slowly from the copper to itself. Then, finally, the aluminum releases the heat to the air more quickly than the copper, thus forming the optimum heatsink system….”
The trick is copper around the heat source to transfer heat away from the nearly point source, and connect that to a much larger surface out at the edge (made of something easier to machine than copper!) so the heat gets spread out where air and radiation carry it away.
“emissivity” is the measure of getting rid of energy by radiation. That’s an important distinction, because I haven’t seen a discussion here explaining how much that can contribute to cooling a light. We both posted in the Copper? C8 pills for $4.30 thread, I was going to point you to my post #68 there for more info on volumetric heat capacity. It is my current position that in a light like this, having as much copper shoved in there as possible is your best bet at keeping the light from burning your hand for a little bit longer. Wasting space (creating negative space) on fins seems like it would hurt more than it helped.
I have no clue but it’s a pretty good idea. If I had access to that I’d make the whole pill from the copper and leave out the brass pill completely. As it is though, when soldered to the pill like mine is it gets hot within 30 seconds and barely touchable at 60.
Mountain Electronics also sells the copper spacers. I got a triple 219b S6 with 5.8A driver and copper spacer from them and I’m happy with it. The copper really adds a lot of heft to it.