Heatsinking my test load

While setting and testing the currents of my dual driver 445 build, I noticed the test load I purchased from Modwerx got extremely hot and even produced some smoke at really high currents. Fortunately the load wasn't damaged so I decided better safe than sorry and applied a massive heatsink to it. I used a heatsink from my old AMD 3400+ CPU to do the job (it's a massive chunk of aluminum). First I had to shim the 1ohm resistor since it had a lower profile than the diodes with a piece of aluminum I cut off an extra motherboard slot cover. After that was done, I applied strips of thermal adhesive tape to the diodes and the shimmed resistor and then just stuck the whole thing to the old AMD heatsink. Normally I wouldn't document such trivial things but I'm trying to get used to the idea of pulling out my camera and taking pics of my work since I have a bad habit of forgetting to do that with my laser builds.

Thats pretty cool!

You might want to check your resistor though, their resistance changes sometimes when they overheat. If it's resistance has changed it could give you a wrong reading. That might mess up a few non 445 builds

Cenobite9 WTG! another fine example of LPF'ers creativity.

I made a thread on this a little wial ago:
http://laserpointerforums.com/f67/t...erheating-dummy-test-loads-try-mod-59105.html



It runs continues no problem. Its a great mod.

Shameless plug:

FS: Heavy Duty test load kit 3000mA $10
No heatsinking needed with these. Well, maybe when we start seeing 5A LDs... :drool:

Bogart said:

Shameless plug:

FS: Heavy Duty test load kit 3000mA $10
No heatsinking needed with these. Well, maybe when we start seeing 5A LDs... :drool:

Click to expand...

I just made one with that exact set up and maybe you dont have to use a heatsink but they sure get super hot.

I suppose just getting the 54xx diodes is easy enough, but i do like the creative heatsinking solution in the opening post