Now that I’m playing with UV leds a lot…I hacked a few highlighter markers into a beautiful set of UV reactive ink today.
…that counts right?
Wow! That’s pretty neat Valor. I didn’t even know hilighter ink did that.
Very impressive picture. :sunglasses:
The driver pulls the same from a freshly charged battery, King Kong ICR26650 4000mAh or protected Keeppower 26650 5200mAh. 5,2A from both. Two things to consider about this driver : it’s on-time memory and there is a low mode pre-flash.
I mirror polished a SK98 ultrafire host that I had lying around. I wanted to test out a few ideas.
I took a tapered rubber stopper with a hole in it, used a long bolt so I could attach it to my drill, put the narrow end into the flashlight body, tightened it with a bolt and then just tweaked it so it was balanced.
That made sanding down the anodizing a lot faster than it would have been by hand. Basically I was using the drill to spin the flashlight and my hand to hold the sandpaper. It turned out really well for a first attempt at polishing a light. 220 -> 500 -> 1000 -> 1200 grit sandpaper then a cloth buffing wheel and a white bar. I am being lazy about uploading pics, it basically looks like this now.
The light still has the usual hollow pill but its opening is only 10mm across. So I ordered some cheap upgrades for it from fasttech.
6* AMC7135 4-Group 2~5 Modes LED Flashlight Driver Circuit (Nanjg 105c) SKU 1122301
Cree XP-G3 S4-5C 777LM 4000K LED Emitter SKU 6813700
and a partition board to fit the 17mm driver into the 20mm opening.
Probably better combinations out there but I wanted to keep it under $10 and the emitter base needed to be copper DTP at least. 6x7135’s should keep it from getting too hot and I am leaving the tail switch alone.
I think the last time I modded a light this much was when I built my SST-90 3D Mag 10 years ago. Its still my go-to emergency light.
Metal & Black :+1:
I rebuilt a £1 cheapy today
I was planning the same easy mod (but with a different tint) but the driver is not in yet , good to see that it pulls around 5 amps while the driver is rated for 3. So that must be just under 3000 lumen?
The bare metal look much better than the original red paint, along with the upgrades you made.
Where did you get the copper pill from?
Looks like a compression coupling with the hex nut center filed down.
Modded an old and beat up Surefire 9P :cowboy_hat_face: Glass bead and polished. Bored out to 18.65mm and then the head bored/honed out for a 24mm Custom made (pretty tight press fit) Copper pill. Noctigon Triple XP-L V6 Ball milled optic, 3S 3-18350 Purple Efest, and a FETDD Zener Mod 14 mode Guppy Drv. driver using 20awg leads, Custom Home made Zero Rez type tail cap mod. Single sided AR Glass lens and SS Solarforce Crenelated bezel, 6.43 amps at the tail cap. Really Bright!!!
Glow-On vinyl rim and dot
I haven’t measured LED amps, but if it pulls 5.2A from the battery the emitter could be getting 3A, so according to your test that would give 2500 LED lumens, so maybe 2200 OTF lumens ?
It is a brass pill from an old thrunite t20, there is more informafion in the build thread.
nice charger :+1:
Very stylish, CRX!
At Kawiboy: that is some major modding on the Surefire 
, and it turned out great! .
At khas: I forgot about the boosting, of course the led-current is less than the battery current :person_facepalming: .
My mod this afternoon, following XXX-men’s mod, a voltmeter (min. voltage 2.5V, from Aliexpress) built into the Liitokala Lii-100 ($1 ! from a GB flashdeal), that charger is tailor-made for these little volmeters, it has exact the right empty space on the right spot to fit it. I used no glue, just a piece of silicon tailcap stuffed behind the voltmeter was needed to keep it in place perfectly.
The cut-out is not as neat as XXX-man has made it, but I think it turned out fine. And mine is orange 
. My six-year-old has followed the mod from begin to end so he is allowed in the picture. 
Has anyone noticed an effect of the build-in voltmeter on the charger? I find that it does not swap between 0.5 to 1A anymore, stuck at 0.5A. Or did I demolish something? (edit: never mind, it just works, had to hold the button to change charge current instead just clicking it) It is no problem because I will not really use it as a charger (still works fine at 0.5A charging current), just for checking battery voltages.
It seems to read 0.02V low on small batteries, I guess a tiny bit of voltage sag from the power that the voltmeter draws. 18650 cells are spot-on.
The volt meters I received djozz had a small trimpot to adjust the voltage reading.
Ok thanks, have not looked for it but did not need it either because this voltmeter seems to read correctly, the 0.02V deviation on small cells looks like to be caused by the the power draw of the voltmeter itself, 18650 cells have way less voltage sag and read correct within 0.01 V.
Had a very unusual light come in from a customer with the simple request… “Make it work”. When I got it the star had been removed, no LED of course and the wires from the driver were completely trashed. Someone had tried to replace the LED and it went wrong. This light has a contact plate, as nearly as I can tell it is factory. Someone had installed a free floated FET driver and it was not well wrapped up. So, I tested it and wrapped it in Kapton tape and soldered in a ground wire for guaranteed contact. I replaced the wires and installed a Noctigon with an XM-L2 1A emitter since that should get the best output. The FET was not the strongest in the world, but it did get a bit over 4 amps to the LED and I did not want it to have crazy amps since the lens mounted to the pill was in a plastic or bakelite holder… The light is the MTE H8-1S and is a fixed optical path with several lenses including a very small collumnating lens.
I modded the retaining ring on one of Hoop’s S2+ pills to take the H17f driver. BTW, it is feeding a triple 219b 9080 build! Wonderful tint and I screwed up and did not get any. 
