I was wrong. the fans I have are a bit different. The core is a bit smaller, and they don't have copper cores. However, since they cost me $3.18 each new.. I'm not going to gripe too terribly much. heh.
Sorry for the crappy iphone pics. The heatsinks are 31mm deep, and the solid core is just a hair over 20mm wide.
Actually for trying to put in a host, one of these might actually work better due to the smaller core size. It leaves more room for fins even after it's machined down.
That's pretty much what I said about machining most of the outer fins off. However. looking at your diagram I see a flaw.
You'd want the air to exhaust out the front instead of out the sides for two major reasons.
1) You don't want to be sucking heat back into the host body where the driver is.
2) you don't want to have your optics on the vacuum side. You want to be blowing dust AWAY from your optics, not pulling it TOWARDS your optics.
The centrifugal fan can't just reverse itself and blow air through the heatsink. And an axial fan wouldn't generate enough pressure to move the air through the fins.
Also- the air's being drawn in through the fins and out the back where the centrifugal fan is.
The spacer prevents air from moving near and/or past the lens.
I'm confident this design in a 4D Maglite would be able to keep a 60W soldering iron at 40C. (insert barrel into hole where AixiZ module goes). These centrifugal fans can be powerful.
If a radial heatsink and blower in a HTPC can keep a 65W CPU under control, I'm sure it would handle fine.
Your not worried about pressure. Unless you had a really high fin density, the pressure buildup is going to be minimal. Pressure is actually a bad thing. In a heatsink, you want the most flow possible, which means the least pressure.
And spacer or not, I still think pulling air towards the optics is a bad thing.