Ambient temperature is far more important. If the air is too hot to pull the heat off the light, it doesn’t matter much if the light has the perfect surface finish. Likewise, if the air is cool enough to greedily lap the heat from the light, it will do so with any surface.
I counted on my hot rods to warm my hands when out playing with lights at the lake here with manxbuggy1 and rdrfronty. But at 41º with a stiff breeze, none of the lights would warm our hands! Not even my M8 with MT-G2 at 12A.
This is why I can’t see how it really matters, there seem to be greater factors at play than the actual surface finish so for me it’s a waste of my mental energies trying to measure the marginal. Besides, I like my Cu and Ti SHINY!
Shiny copper fins are beautiful and it works fine as is, for sure. I’m a big fan of the ray-gun style, never understood why we don’t see more lights designed like that. The emissivity thing is just one of those fun physics facts that make a little difference sometimes, worth knowing about becaues they’re kind of counterintuitive.
PS on the soldering — did you use regular solder?
or did you braze the piece? (“brazing” or “hard soldering” is getting it just up to red hot, with mostly silver brazing material and flux)?
I ask because I’ve done various outdoor copper and brass pieces with silver brazing — dropping them directly into boiling water as soon as the metal’s solid — which blasts the flux off the metal very cleanly, and they don’t corrode. By contrast the same metals soldered with ordinary electrical or non-electrical solder seemed very hard to get clean, and corrosion always seemed more likely.
That one I soldered. I’ve done more brazing since then and improved a bit but it’s tricky and requires perfectly clean parts. I’ll continue to use both as I see fit.
