First of all, pick a battery pack. This is probably the hardest item to find right now. The Voltage multiplied by the Amp-hour rating will roughly determine how much energy (and thus with the pairing of an appropriate bulb, run-time) you're going to get from the pack.
The best bet right now is to buy one of FiveMega's adapters (
3-wide) or (
4-wide [
REQUIRES BORING OUT THE TUBE]) or to build your own if you are handy with a soldering iron. I'm not sure if the adapters are stackable, so you want want to send him a PM regarding that.
I do not recommend messing with Li-Ion unless you absolutely know what you are doing!
If you're going with high-powered bulbs (over 5-6 amps, I believe you'll want to acquire some high-current cells, do a search for Titanium and Elite AA and see what you find)
Now, pick a bulb given that you know your bulb voltage. Note that NiMH fully charged voltages are (1.4-1.45V) so they MAY instaflash your bulb. Take a look at
LuxLuthor's Destructive Incan Bulb Tests. The place where I get my bulbs from is
Bulb Connection
Transverse vs Axial doesn't really matter until you go into the higher powered (> 30watt bulbs). The lesser powered bulbs have a smaller filament so it more closely approximates a point source relative to the size of the reflector regardless of which direction the filament is facing.
Next, pick a socket/switch. I'd recommend one of AW's
Mag D Incan Driver - Soft Start & Multi-Brightness. The three levels are pretty useful when you're running one of the lower-powered hotwires (with high-powered hotwires, you don't stand to gain that much run-time anyways), and the soft-start helps those severely overdriven bulbs (such as the 9xAA WA1185). Another good one is JimmyM's
Programmable Hotwire Regulated Driver drop-in for D-M@g.
Remember that you'll also need
Borofloat lenses (I believe Lighthound also stocks AW's driver if you don't want to wait for shipping from Hong Kong) and an Aluminum Reflector (anyone know where to source these, the only place I can find is KaiDoman and I've decided that the 2 month long wait isn't worth it :shakehead)
However, I've notice a huge difference for the quality of the hotspot between a 64458 and a 64633 (both are driven to around ~200W). I'd take beamshots but I'm too busy playing with the FM3H I recieved today :laughing:
for anyone else stumbling on this thread. (If you consider it off-topic I'll gladly remove it)
