What did you mod today?

…or the fastest option: a drop of Norland64 (or other UV curing glue) on top of the switch, illuminate with your favourite 365nm torch for 10 seconds and presto!

Nice work everybody!

I am a bit jealous of you guys! I have never really been mechanically inclined, although there are Three engineers in my immediate family!

My specialty is being an expert battery re wrapper! :smiley: in addition to being a fanatic about numbers,battery cycles, run times, purchase dates. born on dates,ect.which I all document.

My closest thing to a mod was changing the boot and tightening the retaining ring on the tail switch!

You have to start somewhere…My hiking buddy is an expert at soldering,27 years experience. His dad taught him when he was 15 years old. Maybe he could teach me.

ohhh yaaa,I did take my computer apart once, removed the fans and lubed them w/ NO-OX-ID. It did turn out good, it just took me twice as long as it should have because I struggled remembering how all the parts went back in because I did not memorize/pay attention enough while I was dismantling!!

Today i did not mod a light. But something that will help me mod lights in the future. I have no access to a lathe or a mill. So i bought a drillpress stand (and modified it) to be able to do small milling jobs on soft metall parts (like flashlights). But the old and tired dremel was not cutting it. So i bought a Hilda grinder from BG. But i did not notice that this grinder would not fit the 43mm Holder inside the stand. And making a adapter is not so easy when the head on the grinder is conical. After talking with kiriba-ru (i have to say thanks for his thoughts) i decided to use what i have and try to make something conical straight.
First i clamped a 6,5mm drill inside the Hilda grinder (max he can handle) and the other side inside the vise. From the top i use my dremel and turn the Hilda grinder slowly by hand. With a sliding table i controll the left right movement.

First i decided to let a 3mm ring at the upper end of the head. I did this because i was thinking that i could open up pockets in the material if i take to much material away.

Working slowly turn after turn (it took some time with the old and tired dremel)

In the end i decided to take the upper ring down i first had left there. This was not the best idea because i was right with the pockets. On every of the 3 corners i opend a pocket in the material. I used some “bigger” aluminium shavings and mixed them with JB weld and filled the pockets up. A day later i grinded everything down and used some sandpaper to get a better surface finnish. Now i have a straight 35mm area on the front. Next step is to get a 35mm to 43mm adapter. When ready i will have a lot more torque campared to my dremel. And i can use tools up to 6,5mm inside the Hilda grinder (dremel max 3,175mm).

That is really cool Docc! The result looks professional, you would not expect the make-shift method from that.

And of course to let the old tool make its successor is a very satisfying concept :beer:

Nice! How many lumens?
I have a black flat in my jm70. 605 kcd 780 lumens.

You can find them on ebay or aliexpress, there are sets with 400-600 pcs (20-30 types x 20 pcs), they are only 6-8$ or something like that.
Link
Check out this ones.

I didn’t made a Lumen Box yet, and don’t really have stock lights to calibrate it…
I’ll have to check the tail current but it’s not easy with that construction.
I would guess at least 1200 lumens, we’ll see

Oh, a double post…
Sorry I forgot the last mod.
Done yesterday :

Black Convoy S2
OP reflector
Samsung LH351B 2200K
Biscotti driver with only 1*7135 and mode 8 so only 50% on High (175mA so about 60 lumens !)
Blue illuminated tailcap but tamed with 2*5kOhm resistor
*Protected *3400mAh Olight 18650 inside

You got it, it’s for my 2yo son :sunglasses:

Great job Docc :+1:

I’m lucky enough to have a lathe…. motivated enough to use it too :innocent: The last few days I’ve been putting in some time here and there. Head is bored out, pill is made, bezel is made, body is bored and threaded at one end. Taking my time getting the fit and finish nice. These are the only pics I have so far.

With the help of my brother who has more soldering experience than me, I finally did the driver swaps in my Convoys. We struggled a lot with a too-weak soldering iron, but in the end I can proudly say none of the lights in my house have the dreaded blinky 3/5 firmware now :smiley:

What driver are you running it on? I’ve got a host (amutorch AX3) inbound that I think will be a good test platform for the lantern branch of anduril.

I swapped leds in a grey D4 twice today and both leds are not what I hoped for.

Start: grey D4 with XP-G2 S4 2B. I had a D4 before with these leds and they were the old type that had the best throw when dedomed. This grey one has new type XP-G2’s.

On fresly charged 30Q, at 10 seconds:
3030 lumen
16.1 kcd
When removing the ledboard, the heatsink paste left on the shelf had a distinct pattern, likely it accumulated at distinct postions when the light heated up during use, which does not sound ideal to me. It will be replaced with AS5.

First led swap: 4000K Luxeon V2, from Arrow. I expexted a comparable tint as my D4 with Luxeon V’s, but it was not so. The hotspot was a bit yellow-ish and the spill a bit pinkish. Only a snob is bothered by it but I hoped for the close to perfect tint that the Luxeon V has in my D4. Perhaps the smaller dome makes it behave different in the TIR, not just making the smaller hotspot. I must check this led in a reflector light as well these days.

On a freshly charged 30Q at 10 seconds:
3714 lumen
18.8 kcd
The output at least is pretty good!

So further to another led swap: 4000K 80CRI LH351C’s. I found those at Arrow for 80 cents a piece with free shipping. The 90CRI variants that maukka tested were too much above the BBL, perhaps these are better, just like the 4000K 80CRI Cree’s often have good tint. But no, the tint of the hotspot was also above the BBL so not perfect either. At least the beam is slightly better than with the Luxeon V2: not yellow in the hotspot and this time some bkue in the spill. Btw, nothing of this can be seen on photographs so I won’t bother with beam shots.

On a freshly charged 30Q at 10 seconds:
2817 lumen
Did not measure throw.
So the output is less than both the XP-G2 S4 2B and the Luxeon V2, but with this so-so tint the 80CRI is not really worth that IMO.

Result today: a not so impressive D4 with messed up ledwires after 2 swaps, and some new knowledge about 2 leds I was curious about. Up to the next promising led to check out :slight_smile:

I did 2x L1V2 4k and 2x L1V2 5K, it probably takes the yellow out some but the pink remains I believe. Need to double check. I liked it better than the 80CRI 219C 5K that was in it but, like you, I think the original Luxeon V 4K is really nice and even.

Speaking of the D4, here is mine with its new Neodymium magnet :

I put the body and tailcap in the lathe at work and did a 15mm hole through it.
I then put a 3mm thick magnet and glued it along with the spring board with some loctite

Very elegant solution on the D4!

I’am building a fet+1 driver now and it will go in a Skilhunt DS20 with Luxeon V2 led and Andúril firmware.

Mine’s a lot smaller than most of the mods in this thread, but I swapped the emitter in my Nitecore TUBE with a 95 CRI 5mm Yuji LED. I’m very happy with the results. The current limiting resistor also had to be swapped. I put in a 33 ohm resistor. This should give me about 36mA to the LED.

Not something I physically created today but I did the layout on this 15mm Utorch S1 3 channel driver. 1+4x7135+FET built for Anduril. Probably the most insane routing job I’ve ever had to do. Space was at such a premium I had to put a resistor under the Tiny85 (which has bent pins to fit on a T13 pad so it’ll be slightly raised off the board)

Here’s the copper layer

I was going to suggest to drill a small hole between the pads to let R4 sink into the board, but then I saw that even in that small gap is a trace running.

Wow. :open_mouth: Love your work. :+1:

I "think" I have an S1 and would be very interested in this as well, thanx CK!!

You probably know this, but I think the most important parts are the C1 cap and the R5 resistor (4.7 before the diode). That 4.7 was the key to cleaning up the signals, DEL discovered. Not sure if the 47 ohm and 100K are that super important. Of course the diode itself is optional, but adds reverse polarity protection.

I'm not a fan of the triple channels - I prefer the simpler FET+1. I had a lot of troubles getting the FET+bank+1 ramping looking smooth and it's still not that smooth. Not sure if TK worked out the kinks in Anduril, but if she did, would love to see how. I believe, not sure, she overlaps the channel transitions which may have smoothed it out. The NarsilM FET+1 tables ramp great, but the triple has a noticeable transition. Of course to create the ramping tables, I used TK's tool, a Python script, to build them. The other major problem with triples is they use up my limited supply of eagleclaw 7135's.

Not a problem because I can still use this driver as a FET+1 with NarsilM v1.3.