What did you mod today?

Wow what a powerhouse. And with those aspire 18350s the capacity is more decent.

Pills that were equipped with convoy retaining ring had no slots for unscrewing. I think Ive sold ~100pcs (several assembled) but nobody even asked me how to assemble it. Pretty simple, assemble everything outside host, screw hard driver ring while pill is fixed for cylindrical part, and then use same holes on ring to screw it inside host.
All new pills are equipped with custom rings and both pill and ring have milled slots.

Thanks Dale :wink:
I like that background as well, despite sometimes it is hard to make a good colour balance (well, it is juts a cellphone :smiley: )!

Yup, you did tell me that and that’s the reason why I have your “saying” in my signature, you predicted it all! And inspired it in some way seeing all the nice “enlightened” creatures you bring to us :+1:
Thank you!!! :blush:

Sorry - been having difficulties with google images lately - pics should be back now.

…& I’m not even going to mention the “T”word until my new lux meter turns up…. :nerd_face:

Thanks for your answer
Since i had to file down the retaining ring quite a lot for the TA driver, i could not get it as tight as i would like (since the notches were gone from the ring)
Thats why i filed down the nothes on the pill :sunglasses:

I’d bug Hank about adding this by default, but I think he might have more ambitious goals in mind. Still, it’d be nice to have a supermoon mode built in to the stock light.

Have a couple x5/x6 drivers from BG, and a couple lighted switches. Been waiting to find a host that will accept the lighted switch PCB, but no luck and got tired of waiting.

Went through my parts bin and found a few 219b’s a few Noctigon boards, a bunch of p60 pills and an OP p60 reflector. Soldered the Noctigon to the pill, reflowed the 219b to the Noctigon, and installed the driver. Did not work, not one bit. Visually, I could not find nothing wrong with it. Maybe 219b dont like the DTP pad on the noctigon, or maybe bad reflow? I dont know.

Took the driver out and looked at my shelf… Saw an old XinTD X3 sitting there, unloved. It had a decent driver in it, think it was the 4 mode qlite. Nice tint emitter. Put the X5 driver in it, and fired right up in moonlite.

I ignored doing an emitter or driver swap in the X3 because it just seemed like it would be a pain in the arse to work inside the head, but was surprisingly easy.

I had put a royal blue switch boot in it as soon as I got it, like all my lights that will take it. The switch boots have a shorter nub that the X3 came with. With the new UI, I felt the slop in the switch felt wrong, so set out to fix it. I found a mechanical pencil eraser that fit in the switch spacer hole perfect, kept trimming it down until it was a solid responsive feel. But at that time it was too short and didnt stay in the spacers hole securely. So I chopped up a black boot to fit, was too tight, so chopped just the nub out and same result as the eraser. Finally I tried the switch with out the plastic spacer ring, and perfection. Nice responsive feel with out being too sensitive to touch.

Another problem I had and fixed a while ago with this light was issues with using a 26650. I thought the 26650 was too long and pushing on the driver and causing shorts. turned out it was contacting the metal switch assembly. I had cut out a washer of sorts to fit around the brass negative contact, but isolate the switch assembly. Never had a problem with any of my 26650s again in it.

Love the options with this new driver. I have been sitting here for 30 mins or so trying to set thermal regulation. Just shut the light off and decided with the XML2, it does not need it in this host.

New light built: Sofirn C8F with three XP-L HI V3 3C. Inside Lexel’s board with customized Narsil. Comparision pictures with BLF A6 (the same LED) are in linked album. Pulls 10A on turbo, so it should be ~3000lm.

Fenix HP11 with replaced led and cable

Nichia 219C 90CRI

And Olight S15 baton, fried and with ledil optics and driver from bronte v3 (buck-boost 0,9-9v)

Nice work above from Pulsar, g_damian and Hemionline, modding still thrives at BLF!

g_damian, did you consider using the switch leds?, I think that maybe both the Sofirn C8f host and driver support it.

Thanks djozz, now need to decide on what emitter to use in it. It’s got a nice tint xml2 already though…
Kept playing with my ut02 today. Would love to get the GT UI on it, but looks like the driver board is kind of a unique shape. Maybe can be flashed? Dunno…

Can’t wait for Lexel to start making ut-02 sized boost drivers. They will enable any BLF UI as well as give a nice power boost.

That would be pretty sweet.

Thanks! I have focused on NarsilM modifications, but that’s definitely the good idea.

I did cosmetic work on a Sofirn C8F host this morning, the inside is still empty. Blowtorched the body parts for a fading dark to middle brown, then lots of disc-sanding: added a Foybezeledtm SS C8 bezel from Simon, and removed the ears from the tail (I never use lanyards).

Nice work djozz and I dont even have to Goggle what a Foy bezel is. :slight_smile:

:smiley:
But perhaps a cross-reference is in place here: Foybezel.

That’s sweet looking Jozz! Nice work!

Awesome!! Looks way better!

To my surprise I got the light finished before fetching my son from school. Did it a bit selfish though: did not make pictures of the build apart from the result. These are the steps I took though:

*removed the switchboard from the host and fully test-wired (with test-XM-L2) the 17mm NarsilM driver that I got from Lexel (his service is a real help for the BLF community, thanks!) It worked fine, including the switch-led functions.
*removed all internal parts and blowtorched the three body parts (not the bezel because is not used. The tail got a bit too light-brown so I stopped earlier with the tube, and still earlier with the head.
*attached the Convoy SS bezel and sanded the bezel flat with the disc sander, took a while because I need to replace the sanding paper disc. Bevelled the edge
*sawed of the ears of the tail part and sanded the tail flat. Bevelled the edge
*replaced the green leds of the switch-board with orange ones, and replaced the two 33 KOhm resistors on the switch-board with 3.3 kOhm ones, so that the orange leds are at least as bright as the green leds were.
*the Lexel 17mm NarsilM driver has 7135 chips on the battery side so the driver retaining ring hardly screws in. So I bevelled the inside of that brass ring quite a bit, but also filed the corners off the 7135 chips.
*Soldered a connecting wire for the swich leds to the switch board (the host comes without one)
*reflowed three Nichia 219C SM4070e R9050 leds ( :heart_eyes: ) on that great DTP copper triple board that this host comes with.
*opened up the center pieces a bit with a hand-countersink device (they were blocking a bit too much light to the side)
*attached long (~7cm) ledwires to the board.
*assembled the head tight, with generous Arctic Silver 5 under the ledboard.
*soldered the five wires sticking out of the head to the correct pads on the driver, the led+ wire directly through the center hole of the driver to the top of the driver spring.
*pushed the bundle of wires into the hole, pushed the driver in position and closed the retaining ring.

Done! And everything went well without too much troubleshooting needed.

A few performance results on a 30Q battery:
*11A with battery full, the long ledwires limit the current quite a bit.
*2080 lumen at start, 2040 at 30 seconds. Just 2% drop, this light is steady alright!! Efficiency at max is about 50 lm/W, which is not great.
*perfect tint and colour rendering, great beam: beautiful hotspot, tintshift as little as you would ever wish
*UI= :heart_eyes: , as expected from NarsilM, with lighted switch when off.

Pics:


^ white balance was on auto, above picture shows the beam quite well, but not the tint.

Conclusion for this Sofirn C8F host: you get an immense good host for almost no money, well done Sofirn+BLFdevelopers! It is a bit more challenging building this up than a simple C8 or a S2+, but there’s at least no stupid design flaws that needs building around. The amount of aluminium in the right places, the thick and flat shelf and the copper DTP board make for great heat spreading, I still need to check but in my build a stepdown may not be needed before 10 minutes.

Edit, costs (not too bad this time :slight_smile: )
Host $13.21
SS bezel $4.50
Driver $14.50
Nichia leds $14
Switch leds/resistors $0.70
Total $46.91