I split out the A-lights to their own thread:
I believe that at some point adding more aluminium is just wrong, it adds too much weight.
If you heat 1g of aluminum from 20C to 60C, it can store ~36 Ws of heat.
If you heat 1g of paraffin wax from 20C to 60C, it can store ~310 Ws of heat.
That’s why some time ago I suggested this:
http://budgetlightforum.com/comment/1310922
ADDED:
Paraffin wax is 3 times lighter than aluminium, so volumetric heat capacity is just 3 times better.
I don’t think this is relevant to flashlights.
We don’t want to store heat, we want to transfer it.
For sustained performance, transfer is everything, storage is nothing.
For turbo times both matter. In highly overpowered lights (and this one is highly overpowered even with all those fins), storage is far more important of the two.
That is a good question actually.
I have a few manufactures wanting to do a BLF light along with several ideas of my own but I don’t want to do it like the GT again, that was WAY WAY too much manual labor.
So I am looking for options to vastly reduce the manual labor involved in the process and one possibility is to get an outside site with a shopping cart setup to handle a big part of the labor involved with a GB. This would cost something, although no idea how much.
If anyone has any experience or knows of an option to maintaining an interest list and the purchasing of the item in a more automated fashion, please let me know.
If there is some money left in the BLF donation fund I think that setting up a method to make future GB’s much simpler and smoother would be a worthwhile investment personally.
It seems fairly common for flashlight vendors to come to BLF expecting it to be, basically, a way to market their products… an easy way to make a profit. Generally when companies take that approach, I turn them down because they’re missing the point — although tuángòu happens here, that’s not the purpose of the forum. And if it’s vendor-initiated, I’m not sure that’s really the point of tuángòu either.
However, when a vendor wants to participate in the community in a meaningful way, chatting and collaborating and giving something back, I try to help them.
The commercialization of BLF is a controversial topic, a mixed bag, but I hope we can guide it in directions which are a win for everyone instead of just making the site an advertising platform. I don’t think we need another Massdrop, Woot, or Groupon.
I agree, I have turned down several manufactures that were obviously in it just for the money already.
The only ones I even consider working with are ones that take feedback and work with us for the greater good.
In this particular case most of the projects and manufactures I am talking to now are wanting to make the next BLF design, they just have different opinions on the basic form factor they would like to make (which makes sense, they want it to fit into their existing lineup).
I guess I should of said I have several production facilities ready and willing to help us bring the next BLF project to market. 
Thank you, I thought it was too… as well as an important one.
Hopefully the person that has the money will either update the thread if the balance left is not up to date OR turn over the $486.37 so it can be used to do some good.
In reply to a post further back about computers.
You want fun with computers.
Try my decade 77yrs.
We started with pen and paper. Slide rules. Then calculators.
Then came games. then came 286 WOW. updated to 386 with a 5 meg HDD. and 5in floppy’s. super wow.
Thennnnn. Mr WINDOWS popped up. with a “mouse”. Quick. hide it from the cat.
No more keyboard and DOSS for everything. Just programming nowadays. Heaven.
Then Win 3 etc. The rest is history.
Linux for experimenters and Apple for. Who knows what??.
I don’t. it has nothing that turns me on.
YOU lot have it sooo easy. you could never envisage…
Plus internet that actually moves.
and is NOT connected to a ph line that’s “programmed” to drop out every ten minutes
to make them more money with your constant redialling. Yep that was real good.
Win 7 was good, finally. Then 10 backwards steps with 8.5. Whoops, forget that one.
Win 10. Really. is about the best there’ll ever be. It almost runs\repairs itself.
I still have all the sets. and WIN official CD’s. from DOS 5 (7 x 3.5 discs) onwards. Just for nostalgia.
Threw out the floppy’s they started to crack round centres.
We didn’t even have Biro’s in school.
Class prefect. powder ink mixed daily and a bit of wood with a Broad\med\wide. NIB on the end of it.
Pencils were the modern world. and the END of decent freehand writing.
That NIB and it’s two little end bits. Completely control YOU.
Look at a modern fountain pen tip. Remove the two little balls on ends of the tips.
THAT’s what we wrote with.
Everything was a “scrawl” after that.
Sorry. just a little nostalgia.
I have “LOVE” Tattoo’d on my left knuckles. compliments of a darning needle and that school ink.
with a snake round a sword on wrist above it. AH the old days . Dumb as. Probably still am hey.
and rambling. just a little . (old age). don’t worry. You’ll ALL get it I hope.
One day.
And remember. EVERY day… is a good day.
There’s ALWAYS somebody worse off than you. Right to the second YOU die.
Take that to bed with you. OK. and wake up to it.
Jeez. I just read that.
Really went on a bit. didn’t I. Sorry. Blame the numbers. 77 on 17th June.
I can’t believe an Australian posted a recap of early computer development without mentioning Trumpet Winsock, Sacrilege! It was the best TCP/IP stack by far, and a product of the land of Oz.
I remember Trumpet Winsock! That was about the only reliable bit of operating system functionality on my Windows 3.1 box, presumably because it didn’t come from Microsoft. Never knew it came from Australia, though - you learn something new every day 
Nah, don’t worry about it. Happy birthday when it comes 
This part had me scratching my head. Are you saying that in school you had to mix up your own ink daily and dip a piece of wood in it to write with?
Definitely! I have a habit of visiting almost every open museum I pass by, and am always discovering new things, like the time I stumbled across the Joseph Priestley House in rural Pennsylvania USA. Joseph was one of the main proponents of your namesake theory, even after he discovered oxygen (and invented soda water), go figure:
Interesting guy, I dropped by the local cemetery to pay my respects after visiting his ex home. I’m sure he would have appreciated LED flashlights and come up with an interesting theory about how they worked, if he didn’t die too soon.
Sorry about hijacking the thread (a little).
There you go. a new thing every day.
In the ’40’s\early ’50’s we had “powder” ink. Mixed with water every morning and poured into the individual kids “inkwell” on the top of each kids desk by individual class “monitor.” (suckhole)
we were pre Biro’and Calculators in those days.
We had a 5in 3\8th round stick of wood with a loose collar round one end. Into which we pushed a “nib”
of differing tip dia’s (look it up on Google.) dip. Write. Dip. DRIP… write. etc.
we all had a sheet of “blotting paper” to stop it smudging too.
And math’s. each page had a line drawn down it at 2 thirds across.
One side of page. The answer. T’other side. the workings out of to get there.
IF the working out wasn’t right. you didn’t get a tick. (you’d looked at somebody’s elses hey)
and nobody got past Junior school UNTIL you passed the three “r’s”
Readin’. “Ritin’. ”Rithmatic”
It’s a shame it’s not the same today when you look at the modern Illiteracy that abounds.
Turn the electricity off. ANYwhere. Nowadays. and everything stops. Look at the girls at shop checkouts as an example.
NONE can count past 1-2-3-??
Modern education. on an individual level. Leaves a huge amount of. Lacking. In the real world.
Thank got we’ll (my generation) all be dead by the time those generations get to be in charge.
Hey Phlogiston (Haggis) No beer for me. I’ve got a nice bottle of 46 proof Taliskers Distillers edit., in cupboard.
I open a different bottle of Single Malt for every Birthday. (I’ve had a few to nowadays hey.)
So far. That Taliskers is my fav. Isle of Skye liquid heaven.
/\ Interesting & true…… :+1:
Seeing how Folomov does 18700 cell with a built-in powerbank gave me an idea….
Take a cell and a Folomov-like circuit. Like Folomov surely does, run a strip of metal across the battery side.
Add a simple aluminium head with:
- light engine, a single board that has both the LED and the driver
- don’t make it too powerful
- E-switch
- Fresnel aspheric lens near the LED for wide uniform beam
- USB port
Then use some high-toughness dual-wall heatshrink to seal:
- a back insulator plate
- the strip from the positive pole
- the battery-head connection
20 mm diameter, 75 mm length?
Pros:
- small!
- by far the smallest 18650 flashlight, close to half the volume of DQG Tiny
- among the smallest 18650 powerbanks
- lightweight!
- cheap?
- as always with BLF, superb UI
- CRI90? 95? Why not?
- any colour you like
- GITD on most of the body? Should be doable.
Cons:
- very cheap look
- splash proof, not truly waterproof
- not powerful
Note: Based on 21700 such light would be just as awesome.
Note: a lens similar to that of Fenix E16 would be great as well, but it may be unobtanium
It’s an interesting idea.
Would that be enough of a heat sink? I take it this would be a throw-away when the battery no longer holds a sufficient charge?
DQG Tiny has the same light engine design, heat goes through fibreglass PCB to aluminium head. This is enough for 850 lm with XM-L2. Tiny has a much beefier head though. And aluminium tube. And I suspect it may be already thermally stressing the LED.
I guess this light could do half as much.
Yes, I don’t see a way to replace battery unless you’re experienced modder. LED swap would be harder than with most lights that BLF does as well. That’s definitely a mod-friendly host.
A TIR would be more compact and have higher efficiency.