I got a lot done today. I spent the morning facing off the end of the battery tubes on the lathe. After anodizing all the ends need to be re-faced to exposed the bare aluminum as both ends need to make electrical contact.

In the afternoon I started work on two personal projects as I'm nearing completion of most of the projects for customers. The first project is the Makita light upgrade. Don did all the work and made the first proto. He was kind enough to send me one of the heatsinks so I could build one also.

One thing is required on this heatsink. The backside needs the bulb case attached so the whole assembly plugs into the existing bulb socket. The backside of the heatsink needs to be bored out to accomodate the delrin plug and the delrin plug needs fabrication. I completed the delrin plug and modified the heatsink to accomdate the delrin plug. You can see them in the next photos.

I need to make the acrylic window, glue in the LEDs, wire it all up, add the Shark converter board with a Remora board attached. This will probably take most of another day.





















I also modifed a two bay florescent light fixture to host 7 Cree LEDs and one Xitanium driver. I gutted the light, removed the end fixtures until I was left with just the sheet metal. I mounted the Xitanium driver on the inside and flipped the whole assembly upside down and mounted the 7 LEDs to the backside. Basically, it's a large U shape channel with the driver inside the U channel and the LEDs on the bottom of the U channel. You can see in the above picture the side by side before and after picture. I took the two pictures with the same exposure.

I'm not sure if the existing lights are 20W lamps each, but, reading the tubes I believe that is what they are. That means I'm replacing a dual 20W lamp assembly with ~7W of LED lighting.