Best Method To Replace Your Astrolux FT03 Thermal Paste!

Wow, that looks messy. Sure wasn’t very much past under there from the factory. I will be removing my MCPCB this evening to rework the thermal paste.

Well done.

Still, this seems a little tricky to be certain:

- you removed all the previous paste

- coverage is good

  • not too much paste.

Is it getting hot faster now?

the thermal mass of the MCPCB can be likely ignored
so the heat up is always pretty much the same speed, just the MCPCB temperature stays lower as less thermal resistance

compared to electronics its like you got to feed 20W to a part, but with different resistors
the bigger resistor needs a higher voltage (resistor loss of course not calculated into the 20W power as a thermal resistance does not create heat)

Cool video & great music. :+1:

Better hope it don’t start to smoke with all the grease you put under and around the sides of that board when it gets really hot, specially if your board and the host shelf isn’t flat, the air gap will get the grease boiling, the suspension will start to vaporize leaving a nice oily film on your reflector.

Well, thermal grease can’t really boil at the temps any CPU/GPU/flashlight run at, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

The amount and pattern on my FT03 looks good

Yeah not the grease itself, the suspension burns/vaporizes/smokes, I have had it happen. Well the only thing I could point my finger at, I used way too much back in the beginning, way too much.


Please use it, mx-4 or some kind of good thermal glue

Can someone suggest some decent inexpensive paste off AliExpress. The cheaper the better as I’ll be building heaps of lights and selling them. Something that can still handle direct drive. I’ve been using Arctic MX-4 but it’s a little expensive

Arctic MX-4 is good

Yeah, i ended up just buying 20g of it

GD900?

Hey guys I tried dedoming the sst40 in my FT03, it has been a disaster. It seems my soldering iron isn’t getting hot enough to solder on the + and - wires and then they ripped. So I need a new MCPCB, I’m just going to put it back together in stock form. Do you know what size that is in this and new wires what gauge should I get? Thank you

Here

I sliced my SST-40 as dedoming is quite hard on that LED. It barely gave any extra throw so I wouldn’t repeat it.

Cool, thank you.

Anyone remembers what size is the MCPCB? Just wondering if it’s 32mm to order a replacement to use on another project.

Wow! Thats a messy way to do it. A really good tipp to vietnamreviews. Get yourself a soldering iron! It makes things like that way more easy and way less messy!

I used artic silver 5 for this on my ft03