Anyone else find it strange the vast majority of Australia is dark and full of dangerous animals yet you cant get flashlight batteries or guns?
As I stated above… I have never to date gotten a ’fake’ Liitokala 26650 from GearBest or Banggood. They have all been real.
Best I remember from threads & posts long past, they were rated 20A continuous & 30A pulse.
I have 22 of them, purchases ranging from when they first came out to about 6 months ago IIRC.
I’ve managed to get batteries from Mountain Electronics (max of 4 I think, I only got 2), but I’m concerned that if I buy some from AliExpress they’ll be rejected 
don’t really want to drop ~$30 and for it to never arrive.
(It’s 8am in Sydney now 
)
Those 2 specific stores try to maintain their good reputation of not selling fakes.
Aliexpress, on the other hand, is like eBay. It’s made up of many small stores and sellers and it’s hard to tell who exactly your buying from and if their feedback is good or fabricated.
I make a point to follow the legit stores as well as put the items I’m interested in on my wishlist. When dealing with items from stores I’m not familiar with I read a lot of store and product reviews before buying.
Try the Vapcell store on aliexpress. It says they ship to AU for free.
https://vapcell.aliexpress.com/store/1084158?spm=2114.12010108.pcShopHead_11741348.0
Oh lots of them say they do ship to AU - it’s more worrying about customs rejecting due to not playing by their arbitrary rules. I’m planning on getting the Sofirn 5C 26650s 
That makes good sense Jason. :+1:
It’s not worth it ’to me’ to buy from some unknown on AE & risk getting crappy cells to save a few bucks. Only cells I have from AE came in a couple of Sofirn Lights. Those cells seemed to be fine.
I probably would & will buy some at some point from that AE Store BlueSwordM mentioned a few weeks ago when I need some again though. He said she was legit. Here is a link to that site:
https://queenbattery.aliexpress.com/store/1332380
Another Recent POST where BSM recommends this AE Store for legit batteries.
I get most of mine from LiIon Wholesale. Wish they had Liitokala 26650’s…
I haddadoit, justhadda. SP70 ordered.
Sofirn tells me my test light just shipped out today. I thought it went out last week. 
Oh well, maybe this is a true production light. I’ll keep you updated.
Seem my SP70 with HD26650 were actually shipped yesterday even though the status show shipped since 2 Mar.
Better late than never I guess.
Once its here customs won’t care its getting it on the plane on the other side that is hard but that falls on the seller and you can get a refund.
Good to know - might grab a few then. Would be nice if we had more options for local 26650s though. But I guess the market isn’t here for them.
Looks like fun right? I can’t even find a place to test lights where its dark now days to many people in and around the city. You would have to drive for at least an hour to find a dark open spot from my house in either direction with no people. Driving up north not many spots till after Newcastle my girlfriends parents live around there and its quieter but not empty i might go fishing like 11pm or 12am and people are still out. Probably closest would be the royal national park down south.
Its winter soon should be better.
Looks like mine has cleared customs this morning so I may get it around lunchtime Monday Best charge up my Keeppowers.
Mind you, I’ve purchased this light already so that should speak something… but, for those wondering, the proper parabolic curve to optimize for throw should have been observed as the red line I overlaid on the cutaway drawing below…
And it would have been wider and considerably deeper to really go for it…
Also, please keep in mind that I didn’t design this, I only overlaid it… this comes from the lights that have already succeeded in throwing over a mile from a reflector…. like the TN42 and GT (although the GT missed it somewhat as well), the MF04 came closer but still didn’t nail it. The TN42 throws almost as far as these other lights and is smaller.
If I can assume a 32mm MCPCB was used, this overlay shows just where the reflector deviates from optimized throw…
All this also assuming anyone cares…
And to clarify, I’m not meaning to be criticizing only offering Sofirn suggestions for future use… my intent is to be helpful, that is all. As said, I put my money down already….
Dale, thank you for the overlay.
1) We need to assume the original cutaway diagram is accurate and to scale which I wonder if it is.
2) I thought the parabola shape needed to be different to take the larger die (XHP70 vs XHP35) into account?
3) I wonder if the parabola shape also needs to take into account how large the flat circular area is at the bottom of the parabola where the LED is mounted.
The Russian video, although having a very green tint, shows a pretty bright and small-ish hot spot and rather dim spill area - all of which bode well for decent throw.
By and large it has been determined that the flat space at the aperture should be eliminated and a centering ring that is non reflective replace that mirror plated flat zone. I am almost 100% sure that the GT did not re-design the reflector for the change to 70 over 35.
I have even had the 70 x 3 in a BTU Shocker that had great throw, because the Shocker used a correct profile for the reflector cups. But oh well. In this case the light is complete and it is what it is.
I do like the overall design style of this light, and I will probably not focus on throw but tint quality in mine when it arrives… I’m thinking I might like the beam an MT-G2 produces much better than the 70 series, will have to check it out and see. The wider/shallower reflector they went with, having some orange peel to it’s surface, made me think of the MT-G2 right off the top.
I was curious about the shape of the reflector so I did the overlay to see, just shared it for those that might be interested and thought perhaps Barry could file it for future reference.
Have you seen how a sliced and diced 3V XHP-50.2 performs in a C8? Really impressive, and 4000 lumens if set-up properly, from a single 20700A Sanyo cell in my case. Quite the pocket rocket. 
Reviewing the Russian SP70 video again, it shows some Lux readings:
SP70: 85K (1xXHP70.2)
Q8: 65K (4xXPL-HI)
C8T: 50K (1xXPL-HI)
SP31T: 40K (1xXPL-HI)
The SP70 with the large XHP70.2 Domed LED does better than the others - all of which have the small XPL-HI flat dome.
This also bodes well for decent throw while still having a useful non-pinpoint beam (pinpoint beams are not useful IMHO).
Sure, it’s not going to out-throw an XPL35-HI but I’m hoping we’re all going to be surprised by how much it throws….
I would disregard all those lux readings.
My Sofirn Q8 measured 120kcd, not 65kcd.
Sofirn has measured the SP70 at 148kcd on one of their earlier prototypes. Well above 85kcd.
So something seems off with the measurements in that video. The amount they are off seems pretty consistent, though.
65 - 120
85 - 150
Both seems to be about 43–46 too low. Maybe he’s not measuring correctly? IDK.