Maxtoch XSWORD L2K // 2000 Meter Laser Tech Thrower // Full Review

Yes , the beam is just super intense and it is amazing to me just how intense it is in person for such a low amount of lumens. I tried walking down to take some beamshots with just the Xsword to light my way and the hotspot is so small and so bright even at 30 to 40 feet in front of you , with zero spill ,that is disorienting and really hard to use the light for walking at night.

Indeed, rainy and cold so any further (better) beamshots will have to wait. We went from 90º for a high on Sunday to 44º for a high yesterday. Windy and rainy and just downright miserable for grumpy old men… I haven’t seen our rain gauge but pretty sure we haven’t had the 15” robo has had, I’m roughly 120 miles West of him. Been a turdfloater for a large part of the State, no doubt about it…

Glad to do the reviews and thanks.

As with many “new” items and with the new technology , I am sure any replacement parts or after market parts will still be awhile being available. I can say this light was designed for long distance searching for military , fire and rescue , police searches and such and not designed specifically for a hunting light or weapon mountable light as was the Shooter 2X and the M24 lights were , at least not to my knowledge.

With that being said and with me not wanting to try and tear into this new Xsword head due to it being glued well and also me not knowing how it goes together and fear of breaking the light before I can find any parts to fix it……………

I can say that with the Buck drivers Maxtoch uses in the previous lights they have designed , the drivers are either potted or at least semi potted on the weapon mountable lights.

Would I try to put this one on a high powered rifle at this time? Probably not because I just don’t know if the laser itself would handle the shock or not along with the other factors. I am pretty sure the laser is much more sensitive to the heavy recoil than a regular emitter is though and also pretty sure if that laser were to move even a miniscule amount inside the head , then the focus would probably be screwed up and the light not work right.

Now again with that all being said I CAN tell you that the Xsword will handle a pretty good jolt from experience already. I had the light set up on a tripod and I was in the back of my pickup with the tripod sitting on top of the tool box that is another 2 foot or so higher than the floor in the bed of the pickup. This put the light about 8 feet off the ground and I also had the legs pretty close together on the tripod so it tipped easy. I went to change modes with it sitting up there and hit the light knocking it off the tool box and it went straight to the ground , which was a hard limestone driveway. The light hit on the side of the head with the added weight of the tripod and never blinked or went off and is still working fine now.

That does not mean after a few times of something like this happening it wouldn’t either be messed up or quit working , or that repeated recoil from a high powered rifle wouldn’t kill the light eventually , but I do know it will handle a pretty good hit.

1.8Mcd?
Wow, congrats on passing the first LED flashlight I ever built :slight_smile:

The driver…

The lens…

The laser/mirror/phosphor/lens module…

Couldn’t see how to disassemble the module, there are obviously 2 screws holding a cover on but they are inside… I didn’t want to break the little yellow circular seal to take this further. :wink:

The head is a nice solid one piece design…

The top of the head is machined for the big lens to have a nice solid shelf to sit on, the rubber o-ring sits on top of the lens and the narrow bezel screws down onto this ring…

Well it happened much sooner than I thought it would with taking this one apart Dale.
Thanks for the photos of the teardown though.

It looks like the Maxtoch quality runs throughout this light also and the one piece head design should be rock solid.

Is the lens glass or plastic (acrylic)? It is really hard for me to tell with it mounted in the light

DB Custom!

Thank you very much on this! I am very intrigued with those double convex lens system and what it does… Enderman? You know this…

So if I look only the maxtoch laser module it is completely different than this type of LEP? Right?:

With maxtoch laser module we have laser epoxied on top of that glass which is projecting beam into the middle of the phosphor… But no… I don’t get it… How come that beam is so tiny and that phosphor looks like large surface…

Anyway this is Über cool. I really can’t understand in my head how the beam flow happens through whole laser light system especially now when I see it has double aspherical lenses… I mean wtf?

Dale… You should try that lenses with classic led light.

Edit:
Those are larger aspherical lenses. So technically with same type but this time much smaller lenses like lets say 50 mm or 38mm ones we should have some gain on lumen output but then we would loose candela?

If so. Hope that maxtoch will make smaller version of this… Anything above 500 kcd with even more decent lumen output will be great.

If that 69mm lenses gives 1.8MCD 50mm would give roughly 60% less so that would still be 1MCD and 38mm lenses would give around 600kcd… Small Sipik style around 200kcd…

The laser is mounted to the side, in the module, the piece glued to the cover lens is a mirror than angles the laser light down into the phosphor, so in the end it’s sort of a (can’t remember the name for it, where the emitter is facing down from the top?)

I turned it on without the lens in place and that block, the mirror, makes a big shadow… so the double aspheric is focusing that out for the beam.

I took the bezel off because I thought the inside of my aspheric was dirty, looking at it from the side when on low showed what appeared to be a dirty surface…. the silver metal piece that is screwed down over the phosphor, this has an irregular surface and the lens is collecting the reflection of this and allowing it to show what I saw. The lens is crystal clear, on the inside anyway, this one already has a couple of small scratches and a blemish.

I knew you were going to ask that David, but I really can’t say… I can easily remove it again and tap it with a piece of metal to see if it sounds like glass or plastic?

Edit: I still don’t get the placement of that prism or mirror, mine seems to be off center but the beam works extraordinarily well. There is also a spec of what looks like the glue on the inside of this cover lens, which is AR coated as you can see by the green hue on the reflection. There is a screwed down metal cover plate that covers this glass lens, inside the cover plate is a milled shape that places the glass lens just so… I assume they put the dabs of glue on the glass with the prism already carefully attached then use the cover plate to locate the cover lens. Lot of bits and pieces, more screws than I would have expected, everything goes together just so….

naa not worth it to take it back apart……….it works great either way……lol.

You have to realize here that I am looking from the side, with a 20X Macro lens very close, almost touching but still can’t get focus because this prism is behind the glass. But this shiny part is where the laser gets redirected to the phosphor… probably just a 45º mirror.

Recoil function? But yes… Everything in your tear down looks like high quality stuff :+1:

I am still not sure how it focuses the light… It will be very intersting to discover new things with this light. You are very lucky guys… Especially Dale cause he is serious modding expert and he does not fell sorry for 300$ light :beer:

Edit:

I just saw that prism pic… Holly …. ??? Alien technology ? :slight_smile:

Good review Robo…

We tested the new Xsword here in NZ - made my lux meter boggle and in the field and it certainly has huge distance. Found its not suited for our purposes as a hunter light however - beam simply too narrow for scanning terrain. Narrow and sharp enough to spot a gnat’s testicles at 700 yards - but we just don’t shoot alot of gnats!! Maxtoch 2X alot better as all-purpose outdoors/hunter light. Good to see Dale has pulled it down - we weren’t prepared to rip it apart - yet.

Will be interested to hear of possible mods. Maxtoch noted it is set at 2 degrees, and at 3 will deliver wider beam somewhat like 2X, but with 1000 lumens less. Didn’t break the Xsword down or pursue this explanation to see precisely what was meant - but modification to the laser/phosphor die config is evidently possible.

Robo - progress now with next Maxtoch design :slight_smile: - going in right direction. Email coming…

Mike

Yes it is a tight beam and I can see where a larger area is wanted for scanning larger areas when out hunting. As far as on target light the Xsword is hard to beat though with the 2 miles of throw it has and the low amperage draw.

Still amazing to me with such low lumens and low amperage just how far this light can reach.

I hope to see Maxtoch keep developing the great lights for the future as we have seen from them in the past.

And yes the 2X is still one of my favorite lights.

As it turns out, the double aspheric is a high quality molded plastic lens of some sort…

Y’all aren’t going to believe this. I saw it happen, measured it out, double and triple checked it, and I don’t believe it.

At a measured 50 Meters, this XSword makes 1.975Mcd for 2810.694M throw! That’s 3073.81 yards! Or effectively 1.75 miles throw! And now, the crazy part. It’s raining! I’m talking a thick heavy mist driven sideways by a biting North wind! Blizzard if it was 12 degrees colder!

1.975Mcd in a driven rain! This thing is insane!

Meter at x10, showing 79, at a measured 50M distance. That’s 790x2500. AmIrightoramIright?

It is basically a cheaper way of getting light collimated without a proper plano-aspheric lens.
Better than a spherical lens but worse than an aspheric.
Meant for focusing the light at a distant point rather than collimating to infinity.

It is the same thing except not in a compact package, they are using a separate laser, phosphor, and laser sink.

The thing on the glass is a 45 degree mirror which directs any leaking blue laser light off the the side and into the flashlight head.
The laser is behind the phosphor, you can’t see it.
The 45 degree mirror is there to prevent blinding people.

Do you think it looks like this basic design where the laser is firing at the phosphor from behind?

Since some of the laser light might be traveling through the phosphor (maybe blue or UV light) they added a 45° mirror on the opposite side as the laser to direct that light to the side?

How wide is the beam without the main lens? Does some light hit the inside of the light? I want to find out how similar the radiation pattern is to a LED.

Dale told me last night that without the lens in the light it makes a super wide floody light on the ceiling about like a regular emitter does , with a big shadow in the center from the mirror that is mounted on the glass in the laser housing. It sounds like all the focusing is coming from that double aspheric lens they have designed for this light really.

Thinking about this 1.9Mcd throw…
I may have missed the exact number but I estimate the effective lens opening at 55m diameter. Say I want 300 kcd instaed of 1900 kcd (300 kcd is my favorite throw number :slight_smile: ), in theory I should achieve that with the same flashlight with a lens with 6.3 times less surface area, so a mere 22mm diameter lens should do the job, that is the front opening of a Emisar D4. The mirror in the light path will probably block a somewhat higher percentage with a smaller lens, so maybe 25mm is needed for 300 kcd.
The Weltool W3 has a front opening that is about 25mm (bit more even so it looks) but achieves only 180 kcd. Sounds like I have to wait for a better version in this size then :slight_smile: