For anyone who wants to use Flat top cells, you can do it by unsoldering the spacers in the battery carrier. I showed the pics here: https://1lumen.com/18650-reviews/blf-gt/#battery-carrier-blf-gt
Guys please remember that if you follow ChibiM excellent pics and tutorial on removing the spacers on the gt battery carriers you will be removing the only protection the gt has for installing the batteries the wrong way. As long as you are careful, no problem, however it only has to happen once to really screw up this monster light. Cheers!
And all of you members in the U.S. that have those older battery carrier lights, Acebeam Lumintop, Phoenix, Thrunite and such, I’m willing as a public service to take those off your hands, so PM me and we will set something up (might be willing to pay for shipping for the really dangerous/possibly lethal 6-8 cell non protected carrier lights) so I can dispose of them properly for you!
I sold an HID light several years ago because the battery died, this was before I realized it could be rebuilt for less then the $80 they wanted for a new battery.
Out of curiosity, did anything ever happen with The Gadget Show?
Would be very interesting to see how much they can misrepresent a light like this because “its too big”. Its been many years since I have watched an episode and not needed a heap of salt to go with what they say…
In testing I was barely able to see any difference between Turbo and High. From memory I measured just over 10% difference in output but that was with the proto led.
High should be 2 amps at the led and turbo 2.5 amps.
Here is MRsDNF runtime chart for 4 30Q from post #4 of the main GT thread. You can see that at 2.5A your run times suffer quite a bit (blue line). At 2A the runtimes are much better (red line). So for short usage where you need max output turbo makes sense, but for long runtimes (at almost the same output) it’s better to use 2A.
If you look at that 160 line (roughly when output starts to drop) the 2.5A reaches it in 35 minutes. The 2A reaches it in 55 minutes. At the 2A setting you get a 57% boost in run time for a tiny bit less output! I think it’s for this very reason that NarsilM v1.2 was designed to have the ramp stop short of max. (Correct me if I’m wrong)
So 2A is definitely the mode to run for practical purposes and longer run times. The 2.5A is there for max output and distance even though it drains the batteries way faster.
From high 2,0A (2490lm) to turbo 2,5A (2630lm) there is only a higher output of 5,62, so 7 are not bad ;).
Or from 1,9A (about 2440lm) to 2,5A about 7,7% in your case.
If I will get open the GT, a TLF colleague will programm the driver with ramping to 100% output (2,5A) and also put a XHP35 Hi E2 3C 5000K on it.
Ramping to 100% is good for me, because I want to use ramping and I don´t like the short flicker if I will change to turbo with double click.
I know this short break (light off) is necessary, if you don´t want to flash the light in turbo for a short time, if you will use the battery level indicator or the electronical lockout.