Is it Waahooo or Wooohooo? Either way Yahooooiiieeee as I finally finished soldering all the 100 of the 123 tank lights and 100 of the 4AA tank lights. I have two 123 tank lights out for the count and 6 4AA tank lights I set aside that need troubleshooting. Of the 6 4AA tank lights some do not have the microprocessor loaded and one or two don't have the amber SMT LED. Two have dim Amber LEDs and once these two weak LEDs are replaced will make functional units. For each run of 100 there are over 5,000 solder joints to be soldered. Combined that means I have soldered over 10,000 solder joints in just these two runs.

I machined some 140 cannon rods. I've got that setup now on the lathe so they go pretty fast. I also received 200 turrets that I had outsourced and they look great.

I started gluing the cannons to the turrets and the assembled turrets to the top/frame assembly. I was able to program 6 tank lights with the final code and glued completed tops on them. It's still going to take some time to get all the tops onto the tank lights and I'm in a serious need to move these online as they are large piles of tank lights all over the garage now.

On to fixed lighting. The Creex6 MCPCB will be offered on the shoppe along with the Xitanium drivers and connectors. The Creex6 MCPCB will have options to add Cree XRE LEDs soldered on. I will not carry inventory that might get dated, so, I won't carry pre-loaded Creex6 MCPCBs strips.

The cool way to mount the strip and Xitanium driver is using alumimum 1/8" pop rivets. Just drill a few holes, grease and rivet down the strip, rivet down the driver and wire it all up. Two wires for the 110VAC input which only need to be stripped and inserted into the connector. The output side connector can be bought with wires attached. Just cut the wire to length and solder the two output wires to the Creex6 strip and plug the other end into the Xitanium driver. The mod for the dual florescent drivers on my blog dated Jan18, 2007 can really be simplified using the Cree strip vs mounting the LED individually. That took a while to cut each wire, strip and solder it to interconnect the LEDs.

The other simple exterior light mod is shown posted in Dons thread here.

You can get the Portfolio series light shown below at Lowes Hardware store and online at many places.



On the left is the stock light with bulb. The middle picture shows it modified with a Cree strip and one Xitanium driver. The right is the frosted bulb and holder that holds the glass in place.