Nice work Steel! Sweet pics too, thanks for sharing!
At least it has a chunk of heat sink that’s one piece, so maybe it did need a little tightening up, fairly easily corrected it looks like and now it’s a very sweet light, good job all around!
Calling all cars! Or tinkerers. I have a gutted novatac Wichita that I want to become a Flashlight again. It needs the driver, led, reflector and lens. Wondering who has the time they can undertake this project for me in the USA. My screen name at aol is my address if you want pics of the light from me.
The tail switch is intact and I don’t expect you to work for free. I prefer to put a nw led. I would love to have a photo red in it. If you can put a triple in there with a secondary red led running a ramping driver, I’d be ecstatic!!! You can skip the alligator grips, Swarovski button, and tri-color gold lanyard. Pm me for suggestions
Modded a Sipik 98. Replaced the driver with a DrJones H17F. Replaced emitter with a dedomed SST40 on copper Noctigon.
I don’t have any Toluene so dedomed the emitter by slicing it with an x-acto knife while the LED was just below reflow temperature. The driver space in the pill fit a 20mm driver. Fortunately I had a brass 17mm—>20mm driver adaptor ring from Mountain Electronics on hand.
The light has a hollow pill. I didn’t build a heatsink to put under the pill, but I was very generous in applying Arctic Silver 5 to the edges. of the star.
Light works perfectly. It’s bulkier than my other zoomies, but also much brighter and throwier.
I’m undecided if I want to further mod this light. Additional mods I’m considering:
Shorten the light - easiest way is to reduce the length of the pill, back of the head, or the heat sink fins. There’s a lot of empty space in the pill that could be salvaged. Might be able to reduce the length of the light 1 cm.
mod tailcap to make it illuminated.
apply sideswitch mod like I did with the smaller Aleto N8 a few years ago. The sideswitch mod is fairly difficult, but applying it would allow me to take another cm off the length of the light and switch the UI to the D4 UI.
I waved my magic Grizzly at a bar of aluminum and turned it’s heart into gold. Er, well, copper anyway.
The copper pill is 35mm diameter and 35mm deep, with the top 10mm smooth and mated to the aluminum battery tube, the lower 25mm is threaded at 0.75mm thread pitch and has a driver bay cut in. This will be DBC-06.
Thanks robo, the tube is bored for a single 32650 due to it’s 6000mAh capacity. I have the reflector out of my Olight SR-90 Intimidator and am working out how to mount it, so I’m going for a thrower here… when I first got the Intimidator I had it doing 665Kcd in the big light with a de-domed XM-L2, so I’m hoping with the better emitters out today I can hit a mile. That’s the project goal anyway.
I’ve got a big 4 1/4” diameter chunk of 6061 in the chuck of the lathe and need to get back out there spinning it up…
Edit: Will try to remember to shoot a pic of this massive hunk of aluminum in the 5” jaws, before my hands get all oily and dirty.
Could be needed, or use two in series with buck driver.
Or for a modern led like 219C, XP-L2 or Luxeon V, a LiFePO4 cell together with a lineair or direct driver will form a very efficient flashlight, although the led will not quite be driven to the max.
Otherwise you would need to get them from aliexpress, and that would require a minimum order quantity, complicated shipping and import papers, etc etc etc.
3.2v actually, but yeah you would need a boost driver for most LEDs.
For me, even with a 1s flashlight I would like a boost driver because I thoroughly hate direct drive.
I think it would be pretty crazy if someone built a flashlight to use these massive batteries though