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Thought some might get a giggle out of this.

My DIY dive torch, a 3000 lumen LED monster, sucks a bit of juice. I'm feeding it with eight 3000mAh Li Ion 18650 format batteries. Say that five times in a hurry.

At the moment the carrier for these cells is cobbled together with tape, a bit of copper sheet and an old PET soft drink bottle. And it has its issues with intermittent connections, the vulnerability to shorting out against a metal case etc.

Time to fix with a printed custom pro looking jobby.

Printed in a rush so quality is fairly rough (0.4mm layers on a 0.5mm nozzle!) but still took well over two hours to crank out this version. As it threw on the "lid" it dawned on me - the captive design will not let any batteries out once installed but, D'OH, nor will it let them be installed.

Version 2 over the weekend

I was always taught measure twice, cut once. But this is something between the measuring and the cutting - I'm ever so glad it's not a thousand bucks worth of NC milled billet I just got back!

[img]http://www.simonlockwood.net/linky/3dp/batteryfail.jpg[/img]

It may not work but it does look nice. Drill a hole in the end, put in a little hamburger and it would work good as
a fly catcher! They fly in but won't fly out.

No, I think I'm going to mount it above my computer as a general reminder in future... "Are you SURE you've thought this one through, Einstein?"

I think the rule goes, "Measure with micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with chainsaw."

We've ALL been there, so you're in good company.

g.

I think the rule goes, "Measure with micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with chainsaw."

We've ALL been there, so you're in good company.

g.

geneb wrote:I think the rule goes, "Measure with micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with chainsaw."

A friend of mine was telling me about his experience with the Air Force / Skunk Works on the now unclassified F117-A project... His summary of building a state of the art airplane was "The design is digital, the parts are cut on CNC, measured with lasers, and assembled with a sledgehammer."

Looking at it this morning I've realised I can open up a single battery sized loading hole with a file, and incorporate this with a few other improvements into my CAD drawing for next time. So all's not lost.

Still. Think ahead!

"Precision parts"

Part of the fun of prototyping.

I remember paying mega bucks years ago to send a design for STL printing so we could check for fit/interference, ergonomics etc before we went out to the toolmakers to make moulds etc. It took weeks to get organised, cost a mint but the part taught us enough before it went in the bin that the process saved a bomb on tooling rework later on.

The D'OH moment was a moment of annoyance but like I said a lot better than discovering it in a $5,000 mould that had to be scrapped or reworked.

And being able to achieve all of that in a lunchtime now without even leaving my desk?

That is a pretty marvellous place for us to have reached.