Navy Dive Light - Mod completed - BEAMSHOTS !!

Well, I have acquired a MONSTER dive-light from jason_01 (to whom many grateful thanks) and I'm now looking forward to modding it. It was made for the British Royal Navy. Here it is:

It was made in the UK, it says in 1993 but could just as well have been ~1922, lol. It is 12 inches long, and it weighs in at a modest 3 lbs 4 oz (1.5 kgs) which is heeaavyyyyy, man. It is SUPERB! Some more pics:

The quality of the engineering is amazing. That tailcap is solid heavy stainless steel, with threads as smooth as butter. The body is cast aluminium, the lens is ¼ inch (6 mm) thick, the O-rings are ⅛ inch (3 mm) thick… the thing is MASSIVE. It was obviously built to last, and it has to be practically unbreakable.

It came with a bulb which, on examination, looked OK — the filament seemed to be intact.

I stole 3x "D" alkalines from the Dear Wife's radio, put them in the light and… IT WORKED!!! ~15 lumens, lol.

My plan is to mod it to take a WA1185 with 3x AW "C" Li-Ions. It will be the ultimate sleeper dive-light — nobody will think an ancient clunker like this would be able to blast out ~1,000 lm lol. I really need to get a digital camera that does manual exposures so I can get a proper shot of the light with the POS stock bulb, and then another at the same exposure setting when I've finished the mod.

It should be a fairly easy job (if I'm going to do it, it will have to be easy — I'm useless at fixing stuff).

1. The tailswitch won't need any changing except to file the end of the spring flatter for a better contact.

2. I will need a tube and spacer for AW's "C" Li-Ion cells to fit the 3D body.

3. I'll also need a new reflector as the stock one is made of a thin metal, which could be tin-plate and is very poor (it seems extraordinary that the rest of the light is so solidly-made, and then they go and put this flimsy cr&p reflector in it). A Mag reflector is nearly the same size, so I have ordered 2 camless MOP reflectors from Fivemega, on the basis that I'm bound to make a pig's ear of the first one when I try to mill it down to fit.

4. Finally, I will need to find a bulb adaptor to take a 1185 — does anyone know if this one would be the right size? The pins on a WA1185 are 4mm apart.

I'm not going to rush this — I want to get it right.

Re: Navy Dive Light

DM51 said:

4. Finally, I will need to find a bulb adaptor to take a 1185 — does anyone know if this one would be the right size? The pins on a WA1185 are 4mm apart.

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Would one of Fivemega's ceramic bi-pin mag drop ins work? You may want to look too see if he has any if it will.

Re: Navy Dive Light

Is it me or the bore is not centered in the body?

Re: Navy Dive Light

tussery said:

Would one of Fivemega's ceramic bi-pin mag drop ins work? You may want to look too see if he has any if it will.

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I have a MN-fitting bi-pin socket which I may have to mod for this if I can't get the right adapter, but the adapter idea is neater as I can then use the original steel bulb carrier which fits perfectly in the light. Did FM make adapters with a fitting like the one in the link I posted? Do you have a link?

Re: Navy Dive Light

tino_ale said:

Is it me or the bore is not centered in the body?

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Well spotted - you are right. It is ~3mm off center, which is strange. I wonder how they were made - the casting could have been solid, then bored out, rather than hollow-cast. It is quite odd that they bored it off-center. The interior looks milled, but that could be the finishing process.

Re: Navy Dive Light

I believe Fivemegas ceramic filled bi-pin adapter is needed. The TerraLux may fit, but the guts are plastic and will probably melt in minutes.

Your mod will be fun. I just hope any changes you make will not prevent that gem from being easily restored to stock.

Good Luck.

Mark

Re: Navy Dive Light

Flash_Gordon & tussery, thanks very much for that help - I think I've found the adapter you meant but Aaargh!! - the thread is closed and there aren't any left. Oh well, maybe FM will do another run soon. I'll post in WTB, but I don't suppose people will want to sell...

FG, you are right, and it will be my aim to keep everything I do reversible - I'm even going to keep that ~0.003 lumen bulb!

Re: Navy Dive Light

Check with litho123 he might have some potted WA1185 then you wouldn't need and adapter.

Re: Navy Dive Light

depusm12 said:

Check with litho123 he might have some potted WA1185 then you wouldn't need and adapter.

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Thanks depusm12, I might have to do that, but I have quite a stock of bi-pin bulbs I got from Litho, and the adapter makes sense if I can get one. Just plain dumb of me not to get the FM adapter when they were available.

I've just posted a WTB for an adapter in B/S/T, and if I have no luck with that, I'll certainly do as you suggest.

Re: Navy Dive Light

HI DM51 - awesome mod this will be, I really like modding older & less common hosts like that one for the huge wow factor they create.
You can speak to Northern_Lights, he built some ceramic PR-BiPin adapters that he may still have, this is a far better method than a potted 1185 because the potted bulbs are sometimes unreliable and badly centred.

good luck fitting the reflector - I hope you get it going and I'll be keeping an eye on this thread for the finished product and the beamshots.

Re: Navy Dive Light

Thanks Missionaryman. It's going to be fun doing this.

I posted a WTB in B/S/T, and as a result one of Fivemega's PR-bipin adapters is now on its way to me, many thanks to jimjones3630. Very good of him to let one of these go.

The FM reflector is on its way too (making that fit is going to be the trickiest part of this mod).

I'm also going to get a camera with a manual setting, so I can do 'before' and 'after' beamshots, using exactly the same exposure. The comparison should be very funny - you wouldn't believe how BAD the stock bulb/reflector combo is - the beam really weak, mis-shapen and uneven, with artifacts all over the place. I might just try and get hold of some zinc-carbon D cells, which is what that would have used, not nice Duracell alkalines.

Re: Navy Dive Light

I'm also going to get a camera with a manual setting, so I can do 'before' and 'after' beamshots, using exactly the same exposure.

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Will the beamshots be underwater ??

Re: Navy Dive Light

Essexman said:

Will the beamshots be underwater ??

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LOL, yes, eventually I will post some underwater ones.

However, first I will take some before and afters. These will be out of the water. I'm not going diving with this thing unmodified - at the moment it is so dim that if I relied on it at night I would get completely lost lol!

Re: Navy Dive Light

With the bore being off centre you may have trouble centreing the bulb in the focal point of the reflector.

Re: Navy Dive Light

rufusdufus said:

With the bore being off centre you may have trouble centreing the bulb in the focal point of the reflector.

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Good point. The tube is definitely off-center at the tail end, but it looks OK at the business end so I don't think it's a serious problem.

There will be a very slight angle on it due to the oblique tube boring, but I should be able to adjust the bulb position slightly in the Bi-Pin adapter if I need to. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will be OK.

Re: Navy Dive Light

When I had the torch I was thinking of having an aluminium or copper plug machined, something similar to the existing bulb holder that I could fit a ceramic bi pin socket onto, it would be an easy job to fit the socket eccentrically so that you could centre the bulb perfectly. I had a couple of similar plugs with external threads made to fit old style mag bodies so I know its relatively easy to do, let me know if you want to see some pics.

I also thought the switch contact could be improved to prevent the sharp contact wearing a groove, my thoughts were to remake the contact in copper sheet with an L shaped end so that the lower flat leg of the L would make the contact, make any sense?

Sounds like you have it well in hand though. Good luck with it.

One other thing, the bulb isnt original Im afraid, think its a Mag bulb, the original had a broken filament!

Best

Jason

Re: Navy Dive Light

Woowwwwwwwwww, look at that GLASS lens. I love glass, and that is a lot of it

Your plan looks solid to me. Go for it dude.. it'll look good next to your spotlight Alternatively, you can pick up potted WA1185s, they surface now and again.

The first thought that occured to me was "ROP it" but there is room for more than 2 cells. Also, for WA1185, you can use 8AA NiMH and one dummy cell in a 9AA-to-3D carrier if you prefer the safety of NiMH to the allure of li-ion.

Re: Navy Dive Light

Thanks, Kevin. I think I'm covered on the 1185 option, with the PR bi-pin adapter on the way. 8xAA NiMH is a very good idea. What run-time do you think I would get, compared to my guess of ~50 mins from 3x "C" Li-Ions?

Great excitement: the MOP reflectors have just arrived from Fivemega! Very nice. I tried dropping one in, and surprisingly, it very nearly fits. I say surprisingly, because it is a lot deeper than the stock PAJ reflector. You can se what I mean from these pics – the stock reflector is on the left, the FM MOP one on the right:

The pics show the difference in depth (apols for the 2nd one being a bit out of focus). The 3rd pic also shows the bulb aperture size difference. The stock bulb is ~10 mm, so it needed that big hole. The WA 1185 is ~6 mm.

Fortunately, the light head has enough depth to take the FM reflector – it just needs some metal taking off the side near the base, not off the base itself or too near the hole. I'm now going to think about the best way to do this.

Re: Navy Dive Light

AW's C cells, I recall, are 3300mAH?

NiMh are 2500mAH so take 2500/3300 = roughly 0.75 or 3/4 of the runtime you could expect from those cells. I seem to recall my old Mag85 running on 2100mAH cells could do around 35 minutes.

Re: Navy Dive Light

I think the light will be well enough sealed for LiIons to be watertight and safe - I'd take the LiIon option over NIMH because the LiIons hold a more even voltage throughout the run time and they are much simpler than messing about with battery carriers.