The Flamethrower Project (3K lumens)

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KevinL

KevinL

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Actually, this one runs pretty cool. Project Lemonade/Project Lime will REALLY set things on fire. That is another story for another time.


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Nine XP-Gs rest upon their heatsink while the adhesive dries. Yes of course there is thermal goop underneath too so don't worry.

The story will continue....... stay tuned. 🙂
 
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Re: The Flamethrower Project

:devil::devil::devil::devil:

Which optics? I don't know how tight XP-G optics are nowadays. Any tighter beam than the Oveready triples?
 
OK.....I will leak out another photo 🙂

You know, it never really struck me how TINY these things were till they actually arrived in the mail and I held them. I mean, I have measuring tapes, vernier calipers, rulers and whatever I need to measure, but it still blew my mind once I picked up one of them and realized how amazingly small they were. How far have we come, once upon a time I was posting a picture of a Triple TWAK Lux3 build, and today I'm posting nine XP-Gs sitting together in the same space. Probably room for 12 except I didn't want to go overboard and compromise thermal management issues.

p789370912-4.jpg


Battery added for size. It has nothing to do with this project which assuredly will not run on CR123* 😀

I suspect Mac, myself and Oveready are all using the same 16.4deg FWHM Carclo optics. Given what I just said about how strikingly small the package has become, I doubt it's possible to achieve very much more collimation than what these optics deliver - for this size.

If you have a single XP-G on a 20mm board, you can use Ledil's "RS" Real Spot 3 degree optics and get a stunningly tight beam out of an XP-G.

For those who are waiting to see what an XP-G thrower can do, you'll have to stay tuned for my SRTH XP-G upgrade. I have all the pieces except for a converter. Did I say how the slowness of international mail sucks? :thumbsdow


(* 4S2P CR123 primaries could THEORETICALLY work, or even 4S3P - there's enough room. However, I ain't going there.........feeding this light a double dose of what even the Surefire M6 eats is just not my style 😛)
 
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So how hard do you plan to drive those poor little XP-G's?

I have one of those 3ups boards in a Tescos 2C, running with 500mA to each LED and it runs really cool with a good out put. Not bad for two C cells :naughty:
 
Hot off the charger could be more than 1.3 amps... :devil:

It should settle down to 1A pretty quickly though. And max design current will not exceed 1.5A anyway, so still within safe limits. 3K lumens is a conservative figure - it should be 4K hot off the charger but only for a few brief minutes if even that so I'm not going to count it.

I'm currently building it as a resistored setup, as I'm still talking about the driver and I want some light NOW. We can worry about regulation later.

If I choose regulated, I could either go for as much as 1.66A or a much more sane 933mA per LED with the options available to me.
 
Cool project ..... Me like :thumbsup:

I build a 7-up for another member with 20 degree optics and it produces
a huge wall of light :devil:

Looking forward to your SRTH LED Tower project as well. I have build
a number of Towers but all for the smaller KT-1 head so I'll be interested
in seeing how much more throw the SRTH head will give.
 
If you want a tighter beam look for Italian made Khatod optics. Their tripple has a FWHM of 14 degrees with an XPE, which is what the 16.4 is reported with as well. XPG will be slightly wider with both.

The Quad XPG drop-ins I make use 10 degree Khatod optics, giving the tightest beam possible with "mini optics".
 
Cool...I'll think about acquiring Khatods if the opportunity arises 🙂


tx101: luckily you didn't buy that turbo tower. By sitting here it has inspired me to build something.. I'll probably make a mess but I guess that is part of learning 🙂

KD buck driver at 1250mA and 10mm Cutter XP-G. XP-G is here, driver isn't.
 
This would be a good candidate for hyperboost. It is big and takes up valuable heatsink space but I think it could fit in a D mag.
 
Care to share on the details of the Mag heatsink your using 😉
I have not seen one in black before ..... was it something you made yourself ?


I wouldnt mind building a couple more LED Towers but the ones for 17mm
boards are not available anymore 🙁
 
The "Lux R/C" boards deliver 950 OTF and 5200 Lux each. Three of them should be doing almost 3000 lumens and over 15,000 lux with a really wide fat light beam. They run on 6V too which would be a nice sized package with 2 26650 batteries. I'm surprised nobody has built much along these lines yet. I just haven't had the time here lately to hit the lathe. I do have Two "Triple P60" drop-ins and when running them both at the same time it is quite impressive.
 
VanIsleDSM said:
If you want a tighter beam look for Italian made Khatod optics. Their tripple has a FWHM of 14 degrees with an XPE, which is what the 16.4 is reported with as well. XPG will be slightly wider with both.

The Quad XPG drop-ins I make use 10 degree Khatod optics, giving the tightest beam possible with "mini optics".
Click to expand...

I have both the Oveready/lux-rc triple with the Carlco and your Quad with the Khatod and I can confirm your statements. The hot spot is tighter with the Khatod.
 
kengps said:
The "Lux R/C" boards deliver 950 OTF and 5200 Lux each. Three of them should be doing almost 3000 lumens and over 15,000 lux with a really wide fat light beam. They run on 6V too which would be a nice sized package with 2 26650 batteries. I'm surprised nobody has built much along these lines yet. I just haven't had the time here lately to hit the lathe. I do have Two "Triple P60" drop-ins and when running them both at the same time it is quite impressive.
Click to expand...

They are relatively unknown. I needed this information six weeks ago before I ordered parts, but only learned of it in the last couple of days. Yup, did occur to me that it would be perfect, especially with my particular battery configurations - I have some A123s sitting around, 6V 26650.
 
tx101 said:
Care to share on the details of the Mag heatsink your using 😉
I have not seen one in black before ..... was it something you made yourself ?


I wouldnt mind building a couple more LED Towers but the ones for 17mm
boards are not available anymore 🙁
Click to expand...

Oh.... the usual sources are short of heatsinks, but someone very generously offered to help me out on a special request. If you are reading this thread, many thanks!!

I shall keep their name quiet for now, not because I don't want to acknowledge them but because I would rather not have people stampede to them and pester them for heatsinks 😉

I am quite hopeless when it comes to fabricating metal parts, having neither the infrastructure not the connections to do so. Living in a shoebox in the big city makes it hard to find room for a lathe!

My backup plan (which I didn't use) was to get a PTS from the Shoppe but this one requires shimming so it is a less ideal solution. If you are in a hurry and you need it now that may be the way to go.
http://theledguy.chainreactionweb.com/product_info.php?products_id=1157



Hmm, I think my LED tower has 16mm of clearance, I'm gonna see whether I can get lucky 😀
 
Hmm.....all wired up and ready to fly, except for one small fly in the ointment.

p117005107-4.jpg


It appears the mag has far more resistance than I thought, despite being a new one. My IMRs are still on the way so I tested with some older LiCo 18650s I have, and the current clocks in at an extremely disappointing 1.5-1.8 amps.

Worse still, the backup plan to switch to a current regulated driver has fallen thru, I just learned there is not enough voltage headroom for the driver to operate properly. So looks like I am going to end up with resistors again, except that I need to drop the resistance pretty dramatically.

I REALLY wish I had known about the Lux-RC modules earlier, they suit my design and intentions better, but hopefully I can get this one to work well with less resistance.
 
tx101 said:
Looking forward to your SRTH LED Tower project as well. I have builda number of Towers but all for the smaller KT-1 head so I'll be interestedin seeing how much more throw the SRTH head will give.
Click to expand...

This is what I've measured for various SF THs and LED towers (all using AW Seoul focus tower kits):

1) SOB1000 and a Seoul P4 U2SWOH-bin LED
2) SOB1000 and a 2S2P Cree MC-E K-bin (mounted on an 0.7mm shim to raise the MC-E die height)
3) Same as #2 except driver is an SOB1227
4) SOB1227 and an XP-G R4 on a trimmed 10mm MCPCB with MCPCB thickness reduced by 0.4mm to match the XP-G die height with that of a Seoul P4.

Code: 
                          Lux at 1 meter
Emitter/TH          SRTH   T-62   KT1/2   KT4
P4 U2SWOH SOB1000   14000  11100   10800   9900
MC-E K-bin SOB1000   9500   7200    7800   8900
MC-E K-bin SOB1227   --    --      --      9900
XP-G R4 SOB1227     20300  15100   14200   13400
 
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Aha, some good news at last. I substituted a resistor with perhaps a third of the value I used and it is now nice and bright on my testing LiCo cells with a 3amp draw 🙂

Part of the challenge of building multi-emitter setups is that you have to check that all are lighting up (I had problems on my Quad Cree - another different build in a 3C Mag). The thing is so bright that even taking a peek into the light from the extreme side has left me with nine fat spots in my vision 😛
 
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