LED Lights

Home

 

 

   

LED lights appear to be very popular at the moment, and I've been trying to make my own.

The case for the lights is hair gel tin from Tesco by the name of Schwarzkopf

The LED, lens and current regulator come from www.dotlight.de

LED's are 3 x Luxeon Star white, 3W Rank T, max 87,4 Lumen, 140° (LXHL-LW3C-T)

Lenses are 1 x FRAEN FT3-LL01 Triple LENS Narrow Beam 10° (FT3-LL01-NB)

Current regulator is a High-power constant-current source KONLUX DC 1000mA

pipe_fittings.jpg (31541 bytes) lamp_and_plug.jpg (50920 bytes) plug_in_back.jpg (42948 bytes)

The case needs very little work to fit the lens, just cut out the lid and holes in the back for the switch and power socket. The heatsink is drilled out using a 51mm hole saw. I cleaned mine up a bit in a lathe but its not that important.

 

The LED's are mounted onto the heatsink and fixed with Arctic Silver Aluminia Adhesive the current regulator is also fixed with his stuff.

 inside_bottle.jpg (157793 bytes)

This how it looks mounted on the bars, the case is started to get a bit bashed about. I had a handlebar clamp from another lighting project, these used to be available from chain reaction cycles but they don't do them anymore. Lumicycles do a suitable one though.

 

switch_strap1.jpg (57737 bytes)

The battery pack is 12 metal hydride cells about 3 Amp/hr, mounted in an old camera case and wedged the bottle cage. current draw is only about 800mA so they should be good for at least 3.5hrs

And How Do They Perform

I've ridden with other people who have Lupine HID lights, whilst the LED lights are not quite as bright (but very nearly) they do appear to be a bit whiter.

Following on from these I made a helmet light

Having seen the helmet light by Exposure I thought it must be easy enough to make my own.

I tried lots of different ideas for a case but eventually found a LED torch on ebay

This is a 3 watt Luxeon torch. First thing I did was take it apart. There was a LED Luxeon star of dubious manufacture along with a poor quality lens. I was able to change these over to another 3 watt LED from www.dotlight.de and a Fraen lens

The Torch from Ebay

 

The first of the pics above is the 3watt Luxeon star LED and on the right is the original LED is a bit wrecked because I broke it taking it out. The next photo is the pcb back plate fitted to the LED, on the 3rd photo you can see a thin wire connected to the + terminal of LED and it goes through the pcb and connects to the centre terminal of the back plate. This in turn connects to the + terminal of the battery pack. The LED and back plate are pushed up inside the torch case being careful that the thin wire doesn't short out on the torch case. There is a small copper piece soldered to the - terminal of the LED which connects to the torch case when the LED is put inside the case.

There is no current regulation built into the torch and I haven't used any either. It wouldn't fit in the case anyway. Using 3 AAA batteries the current draw is 300mA which is about correct for this LED.

I cut the bottom off the lens holder to get the spacing between the LED and lens to keep the correct focus. The 3rd photo shows the original lens and the new Fraen lens

 

Now to find a way of fixing to a helmet...