Sorry for the misunderstandingā¦ I measured both olight st96 and mt18vn with the TA tubeā¦ TA tube show 10500 and 10720 lumenā¦ then I use light meter app to get the all the lux reading. Thatās the only way I can get good reading on the blf gt lightsā¦
Yes sirā¦ it is not the right way to measure lumenā¦ i know two lights are measured by TA tube and use them as a referenceā¦ the lumen number are pretty good as you can see by my testingā¦ those are @5 seconds lumenā¦
Ah, I see. The silicone thermal adheisive is still not horrible IF it is properly clamped down before letting it dry so it is as thin as possible. I have done this in a few hot rods and it works great.
Now in most lights it is used in, they do not clamp the mcpcb down so it is way to thick and yes, then it is positively horrible.
Lumintop BLF GT Flashlight DIY Short Body Thatās the page at BG for the shorty tube but go to Martins site and join and get the code under Lumintop and that will take off $5,
$20 is a bit steep to me and I canāt just give out the code or Martin would scalp me or worse, but that price does give me a good clue as to what an full extension tube might cost.
Kind of funny at Lumintop, the secondary Giggle code for the conversion kit didnāt seem to work so I got hold of Victor and he fixed it for me, he brought the cost down to $83 for the kit and two extra carriers,
I have no idea what the discount would be but no matter Iāve gotten a good deal from Lumintop since day one, but then after I paid up it asks if you want to go to the home page and so I did and I noticed right on their home page another code for the GT that brings the price down to $220, ha haā¦ wow
I guess the GB might be sort of over with if their advertising a code of their own as well, I canāt help wondering why bother with these codes, just sell the light for $220 and skip the codes, nothing is secret anymore, thereās codes everywhere.
But, out of all the codes Iāve seen TAās code is the very best so Giggle thatā¦!
So you measured 2 lights with the tube.
Then you measured both with ceiling-bounce (cb) and set the factor in cb to a value, so that cb shows the same amount of lumens as the tube?
This way you could get reliable results with cb afterwards for all other lightsā¦
(not taking into account, that different reflector characteristics will for sure also have a large effect on the results)
Yeah, that was what I was referring to. Iāve modded a few lights (not that many compared to others, but Skyray V2, 9xT6, Solarforces, BTU, etc) and each time it is easy to desolder and solder the PCB leads when the copper PCB is on those white thermal paste. Replace that with Arctic Silver 5, and you actually struggle to solder leads to the PCB, the heat is just pulled away too fast and I have a 80W 380āC regulated soldering iron. With the fat tip you have to hold it quite some time to warm up the PCB, PCB shelf and wires.
That led me to thinking that while better thermal paste wonāt give you more lumens OTF on a cold start, it might give you a higher sustained lumens OTF because the LED wouldnāt start thermal throttling, and it might even prolong LED life? If I can open my GT70, Iāll do a comparative test when I get it
If IĀ“ve to solder wires to a copper MCPCB, I try something like this:
Put the thermalpaste on the ground, put two pieces of metal (heat-resistant) on the ground and than the MCPCB on it.
So the heat isnĀ“t pulled away too fast any longer.
After soldering you can remove the small pieces of metal and press the MCPCB down and rotate it a little bit to evenly sread the thermal paste.
Iāve found my 80W Yihua 995D soldering station canāt unsolder certain mcpcb leads (30mm copper). The 995D would melt the top part of the solder blob then the whole head of the flashlight would get hotter and hotter.
Then I tried my cheap Velleman 50W and it can melt it very easily and quickly without heating up the whole head.
Itās theorized, and it seems plausible, that itās the somewhat loose fit of the tip onto the heating element that is not allowing good heat transfer. Itās said that the genuine Hakko tips have a tighter fit to the heating element and is one if the reasons they perform so well. Iāll try to test this theory soon.
I had that same problem when using the china tips, ever since switching to the hakko tips I can solder mcpcbās mounted to a light with good thermal paste without an issue as long as the substrate has enough thermal resistance. The clemance mcpcbās are hard to solder no matter what for example.
I used to think my station was the issue until I also switched to hakko tips, now even my cheap $15 soldering iron works great and I find myself using it a fair amount, I keep a large tip on 1 of them and a small on the other.