Some Q8 proto3 experiences:
I had proto3 with me on a school trip to Amerongen and took it on a night walk to some prehistorical grave hills. An I must say that apart from it being quite a chunk of a light, it is an enormous pleasure to use: tons of light with quite some throw, despite the 5000+ lumen it does not get hot anytime fast, in the open air (21 degC, it was a warm night) after 5 minutes it still is not too hot to hold, the operation is logical and smooth. Here's two beam shots in the woods (one of these i already posted abovem thanks to khas):
This morning I took the light apart:
I did not disassemble the switch.
Some things I found:
*the ledboard shelf is not extremely flat, but considering the enormous contact area and the board being screwed down it works more than fine:
*the holes in the ledboard and in the shelf do not line up completely, but the screws are a bit narrower than the ledboard holes so they screw down smoothly anyway. You can see that the leds are reflowed in the middle of their solder pads (more about that later):
*where the ledboard got hot from soldering (or from my rather hot de-soldering ), the traces delaminate from the ledboard base (they bubble up near the solder blobs), I expect this not to be a functional issue, but it is not great of course. Also at one of the sides of the board the solder mask curls up a bit. In this picture you can also see the nice fat traces on the board:
For fun a picture of the double springs:
After this, I re-assembled the light and I found that when I press the reflector down with the glass lens while screwing tight the screw on the underside, I actually centered the leds a bit better than how I got the light. Centering is still not perfect because the solder pads on the ledboard do not align fully with the holes in the reflector (this is a bad thing and we noticed this before but we are not going to make a deal of it because the beam is fine like this):
Finally I did an output measurement with the partly depleted 30Q cells. They were 3.9V which is close to halfway full and the voltage is quite steady at that point. The output of the Q8 I expect to be as steady as it gets now:
After switch on:
3 seconds: 5300 lumen
30 seconds: 5085 lumen
120 seconds: 4958 lumen.
So after 2 minutes we are still at over 90% of the initial output, sounds good to me!