Yeah…. I went ahead & ordered one, but those pictures gave me pause also. I don’t quite understand why they did it this way…. I guess they have their reasons…… just wish we knew what those reasons were.
. EDIT: I just read Dale’s post. What he said make sense.
Usually it’s a matter of maintaining a compact nature and probably also keeping costs down. The light was targeted to look like a smaller version of a BLF Group Buy light, hence, it was also targeted at a budget crowd. Make it a little longer here, a little bigger there, a little more complex at that junction, a few more machined pieces, the cost goes up and up, sales get iffy….
Emisar lights are made the same way. The small Thorfire TK05 has a glued in tail-cap pcb. Fenix small lights have glued in tail-cap pcb’s and nearly impossible to reach drivers. This has been going on for a long time, nothing new here.
A Fast Freddy’s burger is very similar to a McDonald’s burger, yet the price is not comparable. My cousin’s Cessna flies, but the resemblance to your ride stops pretty much right there. lol
Convoy makes a really nice light at a very attractive price, perhaps ruining the whole deal for a lot of people. Get a new C8+ if the price point is that unattractive, this GT mini is not especially adept at being an impressive light solely based on it’s performance. But for those of us that just love how much it resembles the cumbersome big daddy, it’s already on order.
There are a lot of tricks that can be employed to talk someone out of something, similarly there are a lot of ways an addict can talk himself INTO something. Perspective rules. Me personally, I really liked the idea to minimize the GT, that got me right there as I’ve always been a sucker for a miniature version of a known larger product, especially if the miniature is well made. If they took it a step or two further and kept the full scale, so the lights look identical, but in a 10440 size light, yeah, I’d be all over that one too.
I totally agree that there are much higher priced lights out there. And the price would be a drop in the bucket when considering my collection. I really wanted 2 of these, as I already have the GT. I just want to see what the internals look like so I can plan ahead on how I would like to mod it in the future.
I’m not trying to talk anyone OUT of buying this, by no means. I just need a little more info so I can talk myself INTO buying 2
Well, if it’s an XP-L HI running on a FET style Narsil driver then it should be performing at a nice peak value to begin with. Plug an XP-L2 in place of the HI and gain output with some throw loss, or use a Samsung LH351D for similar results with a purer higher quality tint. Slice and dice the XP-L2 to maintain throw, with some admitted loss in beam profile quality, or slice and dice an SST-40 for max power and still great throw.
Lot can be done, much more than those examples, but those are easy improvements anyway…
Exactly. My wife and I pissed away the price of this light a few nights ago, drinking 2 manhattans, and 2 glasses of a good merlot. And that was before we got seated for dinner.
If the factory driver has the switch mounted to it, your aftermarket driver would need to be custom designed to fit a switch on it as well or so I assume.
Be careful assuming things Jason, I rebuild em in all manner of ways.
Edit: I’ve piggybacked a smaller driver onto the stripped former driver, retaining only the switch and re-using it. I’ve glued a switch to a completely new contact board and piggybacked my driver choice onto the new contact board. Doesn’t bother me to put a mechanical clicky in the tail cap and fore-go the e-switch altogether. Usually depends on whatever notion I get while in the process of rebuilding a light. I tend to use parts that are at hand, whatever is easiest to grab or whatever can be modified to work. All part of the challenge.