G'day Everyone
It's likely none of you will remember my early attempt at building a 35W HID spotlight...
That's for the best, because it was crude, and mostly held together with race tape.
I've made a few changes and would like to share them!
Firstly, I've managed to fit the ballast inside the body of the light, returning the Arlec RT3500 to it's regular svelte self. Then I had to work out what to do with the dirty great big hole I'd cut in the body to allow for the cables to pass...
I decided on a DC socket!
(Please exuse my poor manufacturing abilities, and the fact I managed to smear glue over most of the body in the process)
This socket is wired in to the 12V input to the ballast, but AFTER the switch for the batteries. This means I can run the light from any 9-16V power source that can supply sufficient Amps, and that I can make plug into the socket.
The first cable I've built for it simply has two alligator clips on it, allowing me to attach the light directly to a car battery, or similar.
My second option was to raid the box of old AC Adapters at work (I work for a computer repair business - plenty of old laptop chargers). I came across this old Toshiba pack, designed for the old "Desktop replacement" style laptops. This thing has to be able to supply some juice!
As it turns out, 15V at 6Amps is heaps, and it powers on the light with no hassles, and has quite happily kept it running for an hour, without the pack getting any hotter that it would have while charging the laptop it came from.
So now, my little 35W experiment happily hums along at 45 Bulb Watts (I wish someone could guess how many lumens that might be), gets 30 mins from a battery charge, can run off of any 9-16V power source that I can attach alligator clips to, and can run directly from mains power for as long as I want!
Now all it needs is some cosmetic fixes, and I'd call it a success!
(In case anyone was wondering, It's called Petrov45 after Vasily Petrov, the nice Russian man that kindly discovered the electric arc effect, making this all possible. The 45 bit is kinda obvious)
And one last pic, testing how far the exposure compensation on my camera could go!
It's likely none of you will remember my early attempt at building a 35W HID spotlight...
That's for the best, because it was crude, and mostly held together with race tape.
I've made a few changes and would like to share them!
Firstly, I've managed to fit the ballast inside the body of the light, returning the Arlec RT3500 to it's regular svelte self. Then I had to work out what to do with the dirty great big hole I'd cut in the body to allow for the cables to pass...
I decided on a DC socket!
(Please exuse my poor manufacturing abilities, and the fact I managed to smear glue over most of the body in the process)
This socket is wired in to the 12V input to the ballast, but AFTER the switch for the batteries. This means I can run the light from any 9-16V power source that can supply sufficient Amps, and that I can make plug into the socket.
The first cable I've built for it simply has two alligator clips on it, allowing me to attach the light directly to a car battery, or similar.
My second option was to raid the box of old AC Adapters at work (I work for a computer repair business - plenty of old laptop chargers). I came across this old Toshiba pack, designed for the old "Desktop replacement" style laptops. This thing has to be able to supply some juice!
As it turns out, 15V at 6Amps is heaps, and it powers on the light with no hassles, and has quite happily kept it running for an hour, without the pack getting any hotter that it would have while charging the laptop it came from.
So now, my little 35W experiment happily hums along at 45 Bulb Watts (I wish someone could guess how many lumens that might be), gets 30 mins from a battery charge, can run off of any 9-16V power source that I can attach alligator clips to, and can run directly from mains power for as long as I want!
Now all it needs is some cosmetic fixes, and I'd call it a success!
(In case anyone was wondering, It's called Petrov45 after Vasily Petrov, the nice Russian man that kindly discovered the electric arc effect, making this all possible. The 45 bit is kinda obvious)
And one last pic, testing how far the exposure compensation on my camera could go!
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