KevinL
Flashlight Enthusiast
I must say my first sandwich build has been enlightening. I opted for a BB500 converter and one of my TV1K Luxeons. I followed kj's excellent page with some deviations of my own.
My short writeup is here. Hope this helps someone who wants to build their own sandwich. I have a method of stabilizing the sandwich during soldering that I haven't seen here before on CPF.
Thanks must go to dat2zip for pioneering the sandwich. It is really one of those things that doesn't LOOK like it will work, but it does wonderfully. I keep thinking "Will the epoxy hold up? Will it fit? The o-ring doesn't fit around the SO17XA?" but in the end when it all comes together it just works, and that's just awesome. I also need to thank BentHeadTX for pushing the BB500 and the Kroll as a solution. The Kroll in particular. For this particular sandwich, I've discovered I can't turn the bezel down enough to switch it off with the stock tailcap. I could turn more, but the amount of force required is enough to make me seriously worry about damaging the emitter. I think I may have missed out something (chop the legs of the SO17XA?) but it doesn't matter. Thanks to the Kroll, this is a complete non-issue so I won't pursue it further. Trying too hard CAN make things worse (it already did in the early stages of the build).
The obligatory beamshots... The first image is the closest to its real life color, and no, the Surefire 6P is NOT a brilliant shade of red. The SF KL1 looks almost as bright, in real life, but the image really shows which is brighter. I almost had a hard time telling.
The funny part is that in the last shot, a resistored Mag4D+TWOL (this was the exact one featured in the Cookbook) drawing around 450mA on depleted carbon-zinc cells as measured by my DMM, is BRIGHTER than the BB500/TV1K. Is it just an issue of better reflector or Luxeon variations?
My short writeup is here. Hope this helps someone who wants to build their own sandwich. I have a method of stabilizing the sandwich during soldering that I haven't seen here before on CPF.
Thanks must go to dat2zip for pioneering the sandwich. It is really one of those things that doesn't LOOK like it will work, but it does wonderfully. I keep thinking "Will the epoxy hold up? Will it fit? The o-ring doesn't fit around the SO17XA?" but in the end when it all comes together it just works, and that's just awesome. I also need to thank BentHeadTX for pushing the BB500 and the Kroll as a solution. The Kroll in particular. For this particular sandwich, I've discovered I can't turn the bezel down enough to switch it off with the stock tailcap. I could turn more, but the amount of force required is enough to make me seriously worry about damaging the emitter. I think I may have missed out something (chop the legs of the SO17XA?) but it doesn't matter. Thanks to the Kroll, this is a complete non-issue so I won't pursue it further. Trying too hard CAN make things worse (it already did in the early stages of the build).
The obligatory beamshots... The first image is the closest to its real life color, and no, the Surefire 6P is NOT a brilliant shade of red. The SF KL1 looks almost as bright, in real life, but the image really shows which is brighter. I almost had a hard time telling.
The funny part is that in the last shot, a resistored Mag4D+TWOL (this was the exact one featured in the Cookbook) drawing around 450mA on depleted carbon-zinc cells as measured by my DMM, is BRIGHTER than the BB500/TV1K. Is it just an issue of better reflector or Luxeon variations?
