Crazy dual mag reflector concept!

Thinking about all the "wasted" sidespill in a mag refelctor luxeon setup and how the focused beam is around the edges of the lens and the center is the sidespill light, I came up with this idea. Sidespill is great for indoors but when you need sheer spot for whatever reason, perhaps this would be a great way to maximize focused light in a mag setup.

Notice how since the center of the lens would be covered up but not make a shadow in the beam. The black lines are forward directed photons, the red is the ones we are concerned about changing. Please excuse my poor mouse sketch as I don't have my Wacom tablet hooked up yet on this machine.

Finding the right size/shape of the cone would require a small amount of work. I figure this could be done simply with cardstock and aluminum foil. We'd need to figure out the diameter of the base, the length/stretch/reach of the cone, and if it's to be flat edge, or convex/concave.

Any coments? Hopefully this has sparked some interest...

looks good!

I think you're looking to accomplish what the Carclo 2 degree reflector is designed to do. There was a thread regarding a reflector review about a week ago that discussed it.

NewBie also posted about an aspherical lens that does pretty much the same thing in a different manner.
The post was in a thread about 5 watt led throw.

Theepdinker

Right, near 100% collimation into a hotspot. But my idea here would be a small light weight simple mod that anyone could stick into thier mag mod. The carclo & aspherical lens would have to be mounted differently, and a new heatsink to raise the led too.

This is a different way of using the reflectors than using the re-coil style (this way you keep large heatsinking real esate), but yet accomplish the same thing...

A Fresnel lens does that without the big hole in the middle.

It's kinda like Pelican's "recoil" concept but yours sounds better since you can still mount a heatsink below the luxeon. Waiting to see some real results /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I like the idea.

What we need in CPF is some gemologist. Those diamond cutter guys sure knows how not to loose ANY beam of light.

Jonathan, I would have NEVER thought of that. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif

Brinkmann did the same thing about 20 years ago. I bought the light when it came out and I thought the throw was brilliant, even when halogen just came out (and I didn't even overdrive the bulb, so naive). Eh, it's a good idea, but seems like it's been done already /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon23.gif .

Yes, Some of the vehicle head light is on this similar design.

I have some of those 'reflestors' from LED lawn lights, I hope you know what I am talking about, it is hard to describe. I'll try some of those today.
Jeff

That's some novel thinking. The profile of that cone is critical but seems to me to be very difficult to describe. It's not hard making something that reflects light back to the main reflector. But managing the angle so it still collimates is the trick.

Good work!

Wilkey

Cheesehead: well if it's been done before then it must work!
Jeff: let me know what you find out. At the moment I'm way too busy to do this, but just wanted to get this long-time idea out there.

The main idea behind this is brighter beam of course, but the real plan is that it's a simple add-in to exsisting flaslights, and you don't have to redesign a heatsink or swap optics. You could have this mounted on a lens, and just swap lenses when you wanted. A super simple "upgrade" rather than a whole re-design around different optics/reflectors.

you cannot do this with the original reflector
the parabolic reflector is designed so that any ray of light is directed into a parallel beam, but only if it comes exactly from the focal point (the location of the bulb)
your red sidespill rays can not hit the main reflector at that angle when coming from somewhere else (in front of the bulb)

using a lens (aspherical or fresnel) as recommended by some above has a similar flaw, you can focus the light directly from the bulb, but you lose the rays hitting the reflector first (since they are already focused by the reflector, the lens would unfocus them again)

it could work with a combination: a small aspherical lens close to the emitter, that would focus the sidespill, but leave enough space around it for the reflector to work
this way you could, in theory, focus nearly all of the light ... i guess it would be pretty hard to get such a lens though
uhh, was that clear enough, or do you need a sketch?

I think McGizmo has toyed with the small aspherical + reflector idea about a year or more ago.

IsaacHayes' idea could work (the cone can be whatever shape necessary to reflect light at the correct angle... probably wouldn't resemble the sketch all that well), but that secondary reflector would be a tricky piece of work highly dependent on the location of the light source and its isotropic radiation tendencies.

McGizmo has also experimented with a travelling primary reflector that uses a large secondary reflector with the same curvature for a "dual-focus" reflector with good focus at 2 points and interesting effects travelling between.

I like the idea. However, I fear that Panzerwolf is on the right angle. So on that thought, What does a side emitter do for these lights/reflectors? A side emitter is no screamin hell in a minimag. Are there even side emitters available in Lux III?

IH,

Brinkmann did it and it seems to work pretty well. Your idea is a little different since Brinkmann has a hole in the second smaller reflector. Maybe that's just how the reflector has to be, but on the other hand the Brinkmann may also just be a little gimicky.

I could experiment with the concept if I had a better grasp of the math behing parabolas... but geometry was so long ago and I have no idea how to calculate the focus and directrix anymore.

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Ginseng said:
The profile of that cone is critical but seems to me to be very difficult to describe. It's not hard making something that reflects light back to the main reflector.

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It's flat out not possible if the main reflector is entirely parabolic. The Brinkman lights appear to use a main reflector that has a nonparabolic section for the subreflector to reflect onto.