Hey saa,
A thought; would a thin strong adhesive applied around the dome to glue it to the plastic base hold the dome on enough to grind and man handle the led?
Hi!
I would say: it would hold the glass dome in place, because that is just what I had to do with my MC-E's. I was trying to put two LED's side by side each other, so that they would have a "mixed" throw beneath an aspherical glass lens. Whilst glueing the aspherical lens in place I noted that the solvent of the glue used (presumably the ethyl-acetate part) acted upon the silicone gel, separating it from the chips...
this was unpleasant news, never before has this glue done this before with any kind of LED I met...
So I got some "bubbles" in the LED with reflective (air-silicone) surfaces.
I cleaned some of the gel and tried to add a transparent epoxy to fix the glass domes, but it wouldn't tolerate the heat and soon became yellow-tinted, just like the light it let through. :shakehead
My next try was more successful: I peeled the tinted epoxy from the silicone gel and fixed the domes on their "perimeters" with a very strong two-component epoxy (this one seems to tolerate heat a lot better than the other one), while applying pressure (using a vise
) to the domes to eliminate bubbles beneath them.
Now the glass domes are concrete-like set in place, I could even sand down part of one side of the domes to put them closer to each other. I wouldn't sand/polish down the glass dome, because it would prove to be quite a bit of a challenge to polish a perfectly smooth, flat lens-like surface on such a small piece of glass...
Keep up the good work!
Nemo
