Other than the HC copper pill, what materials are used in the construction of the DEFT-edc/LR?
Um..well lets see. The magic formula is:
One of these
That's me. The designer, CS rep, packer/shipper, QC man, head of R+D, purchasing, production set-up, website manager, president,
That first one is completely worthless without one of these.
My loving wife and best friend. But most importantly for all you-the CFO. And an incredible one at that.
You also need one of these.
This is what's known as a Mandy. This particular Mandy is my sister and she does almost all of the production work. She is speckled there because the process to create the sanded portion of the bodies is a tad bit messy.
Then you need about $15,000 for this.
You also have to design the pills and learn CAD/CAM. Here's a shot of my CAM screen after running the program for the pills.
Here's the pills with the LEDs attached.
But wait before you get to this point you need to sort the LEDs. To do that I created a highly accurate instrument.
No really. It is extremely accurate. Two of the components are not on it at the moment. The light meter and the digital thermometer. The test rig is so sensitive that it picks up even teeny tiny temperature differences. A breath is all it takes to change the measurement. In fact we had to be careful to not even touch the LED itself or the heat from our hands would affect the measurement. We had a calibration LED that was used in between each test and a temp correction schedule to correct for changes in ambient temp. Temperature changes as little as .2 would change our reading. This is a very time consuming process and is far far from anything any other flashlight company on this planet would do.
Here is all our XP-C Q4 LEDs rebinned by us. The group at the top left is a continuation of the bottom right.
This is the lab oven we use to mount our LEDs to the copper. Among other things.
My trusty soldering station.
solder and solder paste
To improve the switch electrical path.
The best epoxy in the world.
Teflon wire.
After inserting the pills the joints are covered using heatshrink and a heatgun.
Sandpaper of several varieties.
Grip ring mold.
gold flakes for the rubber grip rings. (edc)
Just one of several tints we use for the rubber.
edc LR ring tint
Glow powder
One of our rubber products
One of our mold materials
Have to use a release agent lest I destroy my molds
Fantastic Ahorton lenses.
Vacuum chamber
After our cast parts get put in the vacuum chamber they then go into this pressure pot to make sure any remaining bubbles get crushed down to nothing.
Of course that pressure pot is no good without one of these. She's old but she still runs good.
Diffuser film
Light meter for tuning the lights and to make sure they meet spec.
We test each LED before and after they get mounted on the copper with the power supply. The ones with too high a Vf get rejected.
Got to have a drill for the tapping.
Fancy 18-8 stainless steel hex screws with a special patch that acts to keep the screw from backing itself out.
Silver coated beryllium copper springs
This is the machine I made to do the sanding on the bodies. I used the core of an in-line skate wheel hub and inserted it into the wood. That in turn holds a bearing which the rod goes through. The drill turns the rod obviously. The rod is swappable to accept other rods for different functions. The end plate pops down to allow changing of the work piece.
My tool to pry open the bodies so that the pills fit into the bodies with an interference fit.
And a whole lot of this
