I have a brother in law I want to gift with an AR-mountable light- but seeing as I have never made lights for this application before, what are the “musts” these lights must have to withstand recoil and the heat generated from the barrel? Anyone done this before? Conversely have there been many mods for these lights- I have a pistol light that I want to swap out with the LH351D. Thanks all!
Maybe a potted C8? 1” diameter roughly on the tube
Yea C8+ sounds good- how would you pot? Follow up question: what does potting do?
Depending on the AR, and how you mount it, the head of a C8 may be to large.
Also are you planning to use a remote/pressure switch?
What about Convoy M1 or M2?
The Atactical/Wowtac or Sofirn Sp31 have forward clicky tail switches . This gives you momentary on option. They can be mounted in such a way as to position the tail switch within reach of your thumb without changing your forearm grip. The side switch on these lights sets the power level so it will always come on at your desired level , either full on or momentary. I have the Atactical on mine and it so far works well. Various mounting options can be found on Ebay for low cost.
Yes- plenty of C8 remotes but if I gravitate towards a s8 or something for tacticool I’m wondering if it fits
These are great options that’s I’m actually considering with the s8-
But do I need to treat the drivers a special way as it’s going into a high recoil/ heavy movement application?
A P30 is generally Highly Regarded in that setup. Throwy, forward-clicky tailswitch, pretty rugged as-is.
But anything especially with a pill can be potted at leisure. Filling the voids with something solid helps keep parts from flying off the pcb from recoil.
The drivers aren’t what you should be the most worried about (potting is good- though do this LAST). It’s the battery contacts and springs. 18650s are very easy to dent/damage and also losing contact during shots can break electrical connection if not carefully designed. On traditional multi-mode lights (which in general I don’t recommend for weapon lights) this will cause mode jumping with each shot.
I’ve designed some contact plates and springs for this before as I’m a sportsman as well. The feature I’ll tell you that you want is cell support around the perimeter on the front and rear of the cell. This is separate and isolated from the electrical contacts. Properly sized o-rings can work in a mod situation.
What this does is allow any axial impulse to be cushioned and distributed/transferred to the cell where it’s reinforced.
Another design aspect which should get attention is beam pattern. Particularly the spill beam. This varies with application and mounting location, but generally speaking, you don’t want light directly hitting the barrel or front sight. A good narrow TIR optic is often what I try and pair with such a design. Small arms or SBRs though will sometimes get a wider beam angle for sweeping /clearing. Deep reflectors with a long shielding bezel and 1mm class LEDs are a good option for long range target/hunting applications. Glass aspheric lenses are usually just too heavy so I generally avoid that route (still trying to find a good PMMA/AR coated ~60mm aspheric).
Hope that helps
Just thinking… way back I was going to do that for someone (minus the potting). I got some old crappy C8 clones, lightweight body/head, cheap lightweight Al pills (beefier brass ones from Fasttech fit fine, though), and would stick in a high-strung XP-E2 or XP-G (at the time no G2s let alone G3s) with a 1-mode 2.1A driver to get decent brightness in a teenytiny hotspot. One of my favorite toys at the time was one of those with a ~4300K XP-E2 (only I think that was a 1.4A driver).
Ain’t meant to be kept on nonstop, but in bursts no more than, say, a minute at a time, preferably less.
2A shouldn’t stress out the pressure-switch too much (and they’re cheap enough to replace if they get iffy).
If you could get some older C8s with pills, vs the “integrated shelf” kind, you could make a few pills in white, green, red, IR, whatever you want/need, and swap ’em into the host as-needed.
Oh. And these!
Thanks mate, the “shock housing” for the 18650 I definitely want to look into making sure I have down pat. might see if there are thick silicone rings or tubes I can cut to size :+1:
As for the beam pattern, it’s likely going to be LH351D into OP reflector in an M1 -
Oof… this is stepping out a bit of my comfort zone. From what I saw on the thread, Lexel basically designed a remote switch mod that can push almost loss-less current and also not fry the switch?
time to brush up on FETs… should’ve paid more attention in physics 