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 )
Host $13.21
SS bezel $4.50
Driver $14.50
Nichia leds $14
Switch leds/resistors $0.70
Total $46.91