Four 5 watt luxeons
1 Harbor freight 9.6V drill
1 piece scrap aluminum.
This is a pretty simple mod to see if this idea would work. I had a broken harbor freight 9.6V drill laying around ($10 on sale for drill, charger, and battery), so I decided to try and put it to good use. After ripping out the motor and chuck, I had a nice body for a four 5W. It's not very pretty, but it's bright. I'm using 4 1 ohm resistors to drive them at about 1 amp, mounted on a little aluminum heatsink. I don't know the runtime, I don't want to run it continuously yet, but probably an hour or two. There's a lot of room for a huge heatsink, but instead of trying to carve out a chunk of aluminum to avoid all the screw holes and ribs inside the body, I plan on going to home depot and buy some sort of flange for the back of the heatsink. The idea is to create a couple of hollow tubes, one in the body, one in handle, and fill it with water to conduct the heat away from the heatsink. Because it gets really, really hot after just a few minutes on high. Oh yeah, I was originally going to take apart the switch to use the forward/reverse functions as a power level switch, but I was too impatient and just put everything together. I forgot that the drill has variable speeds, which means I have a built in dimmer too. Probably not the most elegant mod, but it's cheap, it's easy, and it only takes about an hour to make. I'll post some pictures if I ever finish it
1 Harbor freight 9.6V drill
1 piece scrap aluminum.
This is a pretty simple mod to see if this idea would work. I had a broken harbor freight 9.6V drill laying around ($10 on sale for drill, charger, and battery), so I decided to try and put it to good use. After ripping out the motor and chuck, I had a nice body for a four 5W. It's not very pretty, but it's bright. I'm using 4 1 ohm resistors to drive them at about 1 amp, mounted on a little aluminum heatsink. I don't know the runtime, I don't want to run it continuously yet, but probably an hour or two. There's a lot of room for a huge heatsink, but instead of trying to carve out a chunk of aluminum to avoid all the screw holes and ribs inside the body, I plan on going to home depot and buy some sort of flange for the back of the heatsink. The idea is to create a couple of hollow tubes, one in the body, one in handle, and fill it with water to conduct the heat away from the heatsink. Because it gets really, really hot after just a few minutes on high. Oh yeah, I was originally going to take apart the switch to use the forward/reverse functions as a power level switch, but I was too impatient and just put everything together. I forgot that the drill has variable speeds, which means I have a built in dimmer too. Probably not the most elegant mod, but it's cheap, it's easy, and it only takes about an hour to make. I'll post some pictures if I ever finish it
