Newbie to Cree Looking for some advice....

Hi all long time reader first time poster... Let me start of by telling you what I want to build. I am a police officer and work at a gun store part-time. I have noticed that there is a billion of manufactures that make micro lazers for guns but none that make small flashlights. What I am trying to do
is take a cree led like this one and make a housing around it and bea able to clip it onto a gun (the test gun and waht I want it for is a sig sauer p238). I have a long process in front of me to make this but I wanted to see if anyone can explin to me what is involved in getting one of these lil sucker lite up. I figure that I will need some sort of magnifying lense on the front of it, batteries to power it and a simple on and off swich. Could these lights be powered with button cell battries? Do I need to add resistors in line? where do I solder the conponets to. I am trying to avoid using a board and direct solder the bulb. The whole thing I wana keep just a bit bigger than a CR-123 Battery. Any help would be greatly appricicated! Let me know if It is even possible.


See Rule #3 Do not Hot Link images. Please host on an image site, Imageshack or similar and repost – Thanks Norm

Personally, unless you wanted to go into production I'd just stick with stock lights currently available, maybe slightly modified.

dodgefate said:

I am trying to avoid using a board and direct solder the bulb. The whole thing I wana keep just a bit bigger than a CR-123 Battery. Any help would be greatly appricicated! Let me know if It is even possible.

Click to expand...

Perhaps you could start with a 123 light and have it cut down to suit a smaller battery, so the lense/reflector/whatever assembly plus battery comes down to near 123 length?
Check this list of li-ion battery sizes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_sizes#Round_lithium-ion_rechargeable
maybe a 14250 could work in a cut-down 123 torch?

Do you want a purely focused beam (the term in here is "thrower", usually associated with "aspheric" lenses), or something with some useable light off to the side ("spill") - a reflector or TIR lens will tend to give you a "hot spot" (bright centre beam) plus useable side light.

As a starting point, dealextreme has some decent 123 lights of both lens and reflector types, for sub $15. In the future you can always use the bodies of these and upgrade the LED, driver etc if you want more output.

Or what about something like the Fenix E15 or similar? I have one these and they really are the size of the CR-123 cell. They have a good bit light output (140 lumens, say Fenix) and although perhaps a bit pricey, they are well made. You could also maybe modify it slightly to include a remote grip switch for your pistol hand grip? So its only on when you need it, and you dont have to fumble with the twisty switch cap to turn it on when it's mounted to your pistol.

Just some ideas..Let us know how it turns out!

As a long time shooting hobbyist and a flashlight tinkerer I think I can understand what you want to accomplish.

Unless I mistake what you're looking for, your intended purpose is a firearm-mounted light for close-quarters use. You'll notice that virtually all of the commercially available units designed for this purpose are an inch or so in diameter. This is dictated by the need to incorporate a reflector. Without a reflector what you'll have is a wall of diffused bright light as the LED radiates in an almost hemispheric pattern. This is probably not what you want. The typical 26mm reflector on all the commercially-available lights provides a pretty decent center hot spot with a reasonable but controlled amount of peripheral light (spill). This approach allows a very bright, concentrated beam to be placed where you are aiming your weapon while at the same time giving you a decent amount of light to provide peripheral vision for what you might not have seen otherwise. You could go with an aspheric lens, but this is probably less than beneficial in this application. An aspheric projects a focused hot spot but much less spill.

At the same time, a single battery of the size you note will have a very small amount of energy storage capability which means it's not going to be very bright for more than a brief period.