limited production :: hand crafted :: high performance :: rechargeable :: premium flashlights

This is my blog about creating a startup LED flashlight business. I'm a designer, fabricator, and strategist and I'm passionate about making ideas real. I believe that products are about people, that they should be built to last, deliver real value, and that we need to do a better job than we have in the recent past.

Most of my career has been contract or freelance work and I've crafted products and strategies for both big international companies and startups. I also used to work in the "industry" fabricating special effects for film and TV, along with the occasional hot rod. Bottom line, I love making things.

I'm starting this blog so you can follow along, from day one, and see what it's like to start a business, or fail in the process. Only time will tell, but I hope you find this interesting enough to stay tuned, comment, link, like, tweet, and (most importantly) participate in turning this idea into something tangible and valuable.

For a good place to get started with general info about who, what, why, etc., check out the "Stickies" on the left side of the page. Thanks for stopping by and please don't hesitate to ask questions and get involved!

Please sign up for my email list to get updates and notifications for contests and giveaways!

Monday, May 23, 2011

DTD: New prototype head...what do you think?

Hi folks,

I was playing around in the shop the other day and started some more complex machining on the head. These lights generate a fair amount of heat when run on "high" for extended period. Creating more surface area on the head is one way to reduce the heat build up. I've been dong a lot of empirical testing in my integrating sphere and the reason I finned this head was to see if I could get more lumens out of this light.

Like it? Hate it? Don't care? Comment! 
Just adding these fins gave me about 20 more lumens over the first three minutes of operation (the duration of my test). The difference between 500 and 520 lumens is not visible to the human eye, but if I can find several of these incremental efficiencies I might be able to get up around 600 OTF lumens. It's sort of like squeezing more horse power out of a Ferrari though. You can do it, but is it necessary? Probably not :)

More photos, less talk, after the jump....





No comments:

Post a Comment