What did you mod today?

Decided to resurrect the large fresnel lens from my spotlight build from a long time ago.

I made some Al arms to mount this lens on my UF-1504. I took out the aspheric lens and screwed the arms to the bezel.

A bit of “garage engineering”. Well, porch engineering in my case.

In the light I have a dedomed XPG2 S4 2B (old production style) and the precollimator lens I installed a while back. The beam is not great. It is yellowish and rainbow-y on the edges. I have a XPL HI V2 1A in another pill that maybe will counteract the yellowness. I measured 4,700Kcd at 10.25m. Similar result to the large fresnel thrower that djozz built.

Thanks MRsDNF. I hope you made it through the magpie swooping season safely.

Wow. What a project. Keep at it and get us some beamshots.
A continuing saga that will always be in the Beta mode.

Nice projects, both Ouchyfoot and EasyB!

And I wish you better times Ouchy, glad to see some flashlight work again!

I did a thing.
I modded my Klarus G20 with a tail clicky switch to eliminate any parasitic drain, plus eliminate the accidental activation with the protruding side switch when in a pocket or the holster.
I also swapped the cool white XHP70 with a 4000K MT-G2, so now it has a nice neutral tint, and no more greenish hotspot and no more purplish blue spill. It’s still not the claimed 3000 Lumens, but the annoying bugs i didn’t like about this light are fixed. Now i have a G20 with a mechanical lockout, and a perfect tint monster pocket flooder light.

That looks very impressive EasyB.

The Magpie swooping season is about to start Of.

This was going to be a Quad but I decided against it. Keeping stock. Except for the 20 AWG And bypassed driver spring And XP-L HI V2 3A on Noctigon And stripped Polished exterior. OK, not 100% stock anymore.



That’s the funniest craziest thing I’ve seen! Please tell me you live near Licking County, ’cause I wanna come over and see that thing!

Took the stock driver out of my XinTD C8 (V5) and replaced it with a FET driver. I was going to dedome the XP-G2 S4 2B , but decided against it , as I did not want a pencil beam out of this light.
Getting 4.31 amps at tail with a rested LG HE4 (taken with Uni-T clamp meter from GB) think I can get the amps up just a bit more with a spring bypass at both ends, may try that later.

A couple of beamshots ……….

125 yards to Dead Tree

175 yards

Nice solid C8 right there! :slight_smile:

Nice work robo :beer:

XinTD C8 is one of my favourite lights :wink: I really like the quality of it .

Thanks. Yes i really like the overall quality of the Xin, certainly well built lights.

Do you remember when you purchased it ? For old or new xp-g2 , it performs really well for a domed emitter .

In post #1451 and #1532 I modded a very small AA zoomie with a dedomed XP-G2 S3 3D and a 15mm Bistro-driver. It worked very well and I got 41 kcd throw out of the tiny 18 mm lens. I liked it so well that today I did the exact same mod on a Cofly AA zoomie, that is almost as small but has a bit wider lens: 21.2mm, that promises 21.2sq / 18sq = 1.39 times 41 = 57 kcd, assumed that everything else equal which is seldom the case.

Here’s the zoomie:

I used again the 15mm Oshpark board that was designed by wight ages ago and reflowed the components of a Banggood Bistro-driver, except the FET, that is too big, I used and LFPAK33 FET from Mountain Electronics. And again the driver works well, not every combination of board and components is blessed, but this one just works!

For clamping the driver into the aluminium pill, my trick is solderering a small solid copper wire into a ground-ring-via near the FET, bend it over the edge of the board to the other side and then solder everything in, then filing it to shape. This wires sticks out when pushing the driver into the pill with a vice, the driver is now well fixed to the pill, and it has good electrical contact.



The led was reflowed on a 16mm Noctigon and dedomed while still hot. This host requires no thinning of the Noctigon, luckily the focus is correct with full thickness of the board. I glued the board in with Arctic Alumina Adhesive and soldered the led wires. Then with a permanent marker everything around the die was blackened for an artifact-free beam.

The switch received some attention too, I did not trust the stock switch with 3.5+ amps of this mod, neither its resistance or that it will not fail. I have no pictures but with a hacksaw I sawed a slice off the aluminium switch housing, widened the opening with the drill-press and sanded it nice and flat, that was the new retaining ring for a standard 16mm switch-board with small Omten (spring bypassed). The boot cap was replaced by a thinner 6mm height blue one, so the light tailstands now.

It is another very succesful mod, first the tint is again very pleasant neutral ~4000K, and the rest: on a purple Efest 14500, 30 seconds after switch-on, the output in flood modus is 560 lumen, in spot 260 lumen, the throw, measured at 7 meters, is 58 kcd, almost exactly as predicted. For reference: that is over the stock throw of an un-modded Jacob A60 :smiley:

I purchased it from Richard (mtnelectronics) on 5-2-2015.

Robo819 - You’ve got an old emitter there , if you dedome it , it will be a beast . Made 2 great C8’s with these leds with over 175kcd’s.

Djozz - Another great mod :slight_smile: I really admire your work ! If you ever need any help on the drivers drop me a message (or any “special” driver like zener modded , dual switch etc).

Yes it would throw more for sure. I just did not want a pencil type beam on this light is why I did not dedome it. I have some good throwers already though such as the Maxtoch 2x , M24 (both dedomed and 4.5 amp boards) even a Thorfire C8 that will do 500+ yards of throw , so the Xin I think is good for now.

Thanks for the offer! For the moment I kind of like to work around the fact that I can not flash MCU’s. With affordable drivers with good UI around nowadays (A6, X5/6) there’s quite a few options.

That said, I tried to move the X5/6 driver components to a 22mm Oshpark board and then zener-mod it and despite hours of troubleshooting it never worked.

I sliced the XHP-70 in my Nitecore TM03. Took a bunch of undoing to get there, interesting build…

Did an emitter swap in my Armytek Predator Pro from XP-G2 to XP-L HI V2 3D, the driver is standard so it only delivers a bit over 2 A to the emitter.

It’s not Dale photo quality but here is a photo taken with my Samsung ST70: