I still occasionally dream of having a 4th axis cnc but it’s not gonna happen Tired but luckily china makes items that i can use to make/modify into a tricked up torch.
I saw this hair clipper, got an idea in my head and just had to try and make it work. I hate those bulky skulls that bolt onto pocket clips but this is a whole new concept. I’ve actually been working in this for a few months but had other stuff taking priority for a while. It’s nearly finished now
First pic is the gutted host alongside another hair clipper
I didn’t notice till i had it pulled apart the dent in the tail
Some parts…
Turns out the skull design is on a separate plate that i managed to pry off without damaging much at all.
First up I worked on the body and inner tube. The stock body has a large enough ID to simply slip in an inner tube. Later I will use capton tape to isolate the inner tube.
Next i made a copper ring and soldered it to the inner contact ring on the Lume1 driver. This ring press fits into the inner tube, holding the driver central so there’s no chance of shorting to the outer tube
Next is a screw in shelf
I later found out i had to widen/chamfer the hole so the wires didn’t get cut by the sharp edge
After much head scratching on how i was going to make this work I added a spacer to the top side of the driver (soldered in place)
Next the bezel. I slotted the face of the bezel so it could be tightened with a thin bit of scrap metal. The wall thickness is real thin and i didn’t have lot to play with in the head so the thread is very fine to keep it small as possible. I made the threaded section extra long so there is less chance of stripping the fine thread.
Next the tail and switch. I can see now i didn’t take enough pics to show this clearly. The board is from a cheap host i bought a few years ago (in fact i don’t even remember what host it was???). I made a brass ring that threads into the tail. The ring is soldered to one pad on the top side of the board and isolated from the other. The ring is connected to battery (-) pad. A momentary switch is soldered between the 2 pads which activates the outer pad on the underside of the board. Not sure how much mansplaining i need to do here but basically when all is connected the outer host is grounded while the inner tube is on the mom switch.
Now for the speky part of the build :sunglasses:
I drilled out the eyes in the skull and desoldered 2 of the rgb leds from the Lume1 aux board. For wiring i used the enamel wire from an old broken cooler fan. The wire is hair thin and was pretty hard for me to work with since i was too scared of breaking it during the build.
Next i drilled a hole in the host to feed the enamel wires through. As luck would have it, the point where the wires come through on the inside is where the ID opens up a little and there is ample room for the wires to slide up between the inner tube and outer body. I wasn’t planning on it but i discovered i could feed the wires through the holes around the edge of the driver too.
So end result is a torch with illuminated skull eyes that are fully controllable with Andruil. I’ll get some more pics later. I still have one or two minor things to finish it off.
BTW this build has not been easy. Aside from the tiny soldering which i suck at on a good day, I had other things throw me for a loop like -
after assembling to the point of connecting the aux lights i found there was a short somewhere since it wouldn’t function properly. After much hair pulling I disassembled it to the point of inner tube and body and found that’s where the short was happening. It didn’t make sense to me as i had the inner tube wrapped in capton tape. I pulled the tape off and replaced it. I guess the edge of the tape scraped up some dust or swarf or something to short out to the body. I went through the process of all that tiny soldering again only to screw up one of the rgb contact pads so had to replace that led with another from the Lume1 aux board. In truth the project sat on my desk for a week because i was just putting off doing the soldering, yeh i hate it that much :confounded: I’ll leave my bitching at that, they were the main points I’m super happy I got it done in the end