Alrighty, this has been good fun. Took about a month or two to get everything together that I needed for this little project. And the sweat and blood I nervously shed while dismantling my BENQ 567s was good fun too. Now I have it all together, but I must hold my triplet lens about 6 inches away from the structure for it to have perfect focus, but at the same time the image is reversed (this may be the lcd but I believe I have it in the right position).

Time for some experts to troubleshoot this one up

*9 1/2" from light to lcd

*11 3/4" from lcd to front of structure

*27 3/8" length

*15 3/8" width

please don't be too brutal

eposerd,
lamp center should be 8.8" from first fresnel and lcd should be 13.5 to 14" from projection lens. hope this helps
Peter

i am pretty sure you lcd has to be upside down and flipped to get the image to project properly - not sure about the focus though

I knew a focusing mechanism would be involved but the kind of space extended will have to be around 8 inches out. So I'd make a 6" square focusing mechanism that is 10" long. Is this going to interfere with anything in anyones opinion?

If I follow what you are suggesting you need to make sure that your mechanism doesn't intersect the field of view cone that includes the LCD. Otherwise the corners of your image will be cut off.

Make a scale drawing of what you intend to build and make sure that at the limits of focus (in and out) the sight lines to the corners of your LCD don't intersect your mechanism.

For what its worth I plan on putting all of my components ie light source, fresnels, and LCD in a tray that will slide forward and back to change the focus. The projection lens will remained fixed. This idea is still in my head so I haven't worked out all of the details yet.

Thinking about this a little bit, I assume you are talking about using a split fresnel setup and only moving the front fresnel/lcd and not moving the rear fresnel, right? (i.e. if both fresnels were part of the "lens/lcd package" that got moved to focus the lcd image on the projection screen, you may very well "de-focus" the rear fresnel from the light source.)

Note that I included the light source in what would be on the tray. I'm thinking that this whole assembly can be moved forward and backward using a threaded rod attached to a knob that can be positioned to exit the front or back of the enclosure. A groove will be cut in the rod and it will be captured at the enclosure so it can pass thrust to the enclosure. At the tray end of the rod there will be a nut that is attached to the tray so that the turning rod will push or pull the tray. I'll probably but teflon tape on the bottom of the tray and anywhere other components might rub against the enclosure.

Oops! missed that detail...

i like the focusing tray idea, i was actually tinkering with that using some sliding drawer hinges, but eventually i just made a humongous focusing box which is working perfect now next step concealing the beast