It’s super easy to rip that thing off haha. Glad it helped you! Thanks for the reminder that this thread is here, I meant to update it with my latest experience.
TL;DR: I’ve confirmed you can successfully bridge the R4 resistor and the light should be fine.
While disassembling my buddies D4, I managed to pop off the R5 AND R4 resistors, oy… we got them both back on and the light was acting extremely odd, no strobe modes would work at all, and if you entered turbo, you could not exit it without disconnecting the battery. Also occasionally it would fail to ramp out of regulated mode, just stopping at the end of regulated mode and staying at that brightness. Very weird.
Turns out the connection we made when resoldering R4 was no good. A little more fiddling with the iron and it was right as rain. Mostly…
I then ran into the problem wherein the light would act up in the same manner as it was when be R4 was disconnected, but only when it was super hot. I figure the connection on R4 would only fail if the board got hot enough to expand a small fissure in the solder joint.
By this time I had gotten my hands on some good solder wick and a tub of solder paste so I planned to fix it properly, but when I got it apart and got the resistor off, I dropped it into a large thick shaggy rug… never to be seen again…
So I just bridged it and prayed. Lo and behold it works just fine, ran it through all modes. So it’s seems I’ve confirmed you can bridge R4 as well with no issues.
I need to be more careful with these stupid things haha.
Edit: I didn’t see your remark about ripping out the switch wire, that sucks man. I’ve seen advice somewhere on how to get the switch out, I can’t remember where, look for D4 switch mods, that’ll get you on the right track.