Facebook Hive Mind: There are folks out there who have helped immensely with other questions, so hopefully somebody can point me in the right direction.
On my record cutting lathe, there is a microscope to see what you’ve cut. The way the microscope works is by shining a light on your cut grooves at a 45-degree angle, and then you can observe the grooves you’ve cut either through the microscope eyepiece or (as I’ve rigged up here) on a laptop with a cheap Chinese camera attachment).
My weak link here is the light. When I got my lathe, it had the microscope but no light. I have been using a small battery-powered pen light for this purpose (see photos) and it works…okay. It’s not optimal. As you can see, the light it shines is so focused I can’t get a full screenshot of my cut grooves.
I’d like to find a small, pen-thickness light that’s either AC- or DC-powered (so I don’t have to constantly buy little hearing aid batteries for the light) that is able to change the beam to a bit wider and not hyper focused. I haven’t found anything on Amazon or at hardware stores. I’m wondering, maybe somebody in the aerospace or scientific world might use a tiny AC- or DC-powered light like this? If anybody can point me in the right direction I’d really appreciate it. I’m tired of fooling with this battery-powered light.
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