i just bought nite ize led for 2-6 cell as an emergency bulb for LONG power outages. the beam is super narrow and if i dare to focus to anything useful, it has a terrible hole in the middle, maglite style but worse.
how can i stipple a stock maglite reflector without losing lumens out the front?
i've heard hair spray but how about white paint! wouldn't that make it at least as bright. white reflects well doesn't it? i'm sure it would have already been done on here if it did, so help me out.
The idea is to use crystal clear acrylic, and practice until you figure out how to get the paint to sputter so little droplets splater into fat little blobs all over the surface of your reflector to scatter the hot spot. The idea is not to completly cover the surface, just splatter it with these sputtery droplets is a random pattern.
The way it works is that some light reflects off the shinny surface of the little sputtered blobs (which should dry shiny and clear), and some light goes through to reflect off the mirrored surface of the reflector, then bounces back out through the little drops which act like little lenses and scatter the light.
White paint will NOT work as well, thats why reflectors have a mirrored surface not just a white surface.
Please be aware that the long running Nite-ize does not throw much in the way of output, and stippling really spreads the light out which knocks the intensity way down. Think about it, if you make the hot spot even 5 times larger, then the light has to cover 25 times the area, and we haven't even started to talk about the losses due to imperfect transmission through the little blobs of clear acrylic paint.
So if you do this with the Nite-ize you will find that the light is a bit weak for anything more challenging than, say, reading a map from a foot or two away. Most folks who do this get a higher output drop-in and use the Nite-ize as an emergency back up in the tail cap, to act as a long running 'power failure' light.
