Physical reversing protection is more needed on a battery carrier than with the current Q8 because with the carrier you donāt see the already inserted batteries very well, while in the Q8, before screwing the head on, you have a clear view of the 4 batteries together, a wrongly inserted one is far more obvious.
Plus, most batteries we use have the wrapper bended around the underside, for those, reversing will cause them not making contact with the brass ring. The Q8 is reverse protected for them.
Plus, as a few people experienced, upon reverse insertion, springs will collapse and contact broken before a battery is damaged.
A Q8 is not a light that I will give my sevenyearold to schoolcamp, for the rest IMO it seems to protect its users well enough.
To keep the discussion clear: this happened to the engineer when filling up a battery carrier, not with the current Q8 design without carrier. And I must admit when filling up the battery carrier of the ROT66 for the first time, it felt weird to put them all 4 in the same direction, so much are we used to series-carriers.
Thatās right, we suggested the little white polarity protection discs that other companies use.
I think some protection rings for the Q8 could be machined from plastic or delrin or even 3D printed. The hard part seems to be getting them too stick to the driver. I think thatās why Thorfire decided to not use them. They kept coming unglued.
The prototypes of the Q8 used two raised plastic rings, on both sides of the brass ring, it was indeed kind of a manufacturing head-ache for Thorfire so they asked to not use them in the production Q8 and we were ok with that because most batteries are wrapped around the edge anyway, and ultimately the springs were there as a safety backup.
You got a special ROT66, I only got 3 cells in mine
I had an oopsie yesterday. Testing the Keeppower 6000 in my D4S then putting the 5200 back in and had it reversed, positive to the tail cap. I almost tightened all the way then when the Aux Leds didnāt come on it triggered my brain and I undid it with heart in throat. All good
The D4 had not full reverse protection, the driver protects itself but the battery drains at quite some amps (I believe it was 8A). So if noticed immediately it is no problem, but if kept like that you have a big problem. There was talk about this being improved for the D4S but Iām not sure. Easy enough to test with the tailcap off and a clamp meter (donāt have a D4S myself).
Out of curiosity, would it be possible to order one of these without the emitters? Could you ask Barry what the price would be in that case? Iād only be getting one to swap something else in, and I donāt want to pay for emitters Iāll never use.
People seemed pretty exited that Sofirn was selling parts .. i looked and my first reaction was the parts weren't all that cheap and just buying a light is going to be about the same as the parts you want.
I kind of find this to be true about most hosts etc for sale.like a s2+ host for 10$..doesn't make much sense not to just buy the whole light.
I gave someone an original SRK once. It came back a few years later with two toasted springs because someone put the cells in with alternating polarity. It should be obvious at a glance which way the cells go, given that it has all the springs on one side and a solid contact ring on the other side, but apparently thatās not enough of a hint.