Got my FW3A yesterday from the Amazon sale. I have a few new Sanyo NCR18650GA 3500mAh High Discharge BUTTON Top unprotected cells. After I inserted the cell from the head, the light briefly flashed to indicate contact. However, when I clicked on the e-switch, nothing happens, no light came up, holding down the e-switch doesn’t ramp up to down (no light came out at all).
I emailed Lumintop through Amazon, but haven’t heard back. In the meantime, I just remembered that I have some harvested flattop Samsung 24E unprotected from a laptop battery, so I popped one in, and the FW3A worked like a charm.
I plan to order some higher capacity flat top unprotected LG MJ1 to see if they work. So far, I think unprotected flat top is probably my best bet.
I had to buy a large tweezers and tighten all the retaining rings on my FW3X V2s.
A few days ago, the switch started acting up on my FW3A bare. Today, I took apart the switch to find pieces of what appeared to be the flat black rubber spacer; not the nub. The pieces were not from the spacer in the light. I used canned compressed air to clean the circuit board mounted switch. The switch is now back to behaving.
Wish I would have checked the switch before I originally tightened up the associated retaining ring.
The only time this has happened to me was when the tail cap was loose. I modified the switch, removing the nubbin & inserting a 5/32” o-ring, to firm up the button. It works great. But for some reason, it’s a little more prone to loosening when I partially unscrew the head for lockout. The symptom is the light going out while ramping up. Tightening the tail cap fixes it every time.
Well not always., out of more than a dozen first and second run lights (no not all for me) I had one light that the only way I could get it to work reliably was to remove the retaining ring from the tail cap.
OK, I had crud in the threads somewhere. Screwing the head and tailcap back and forth released some grinding/sticking points, then adding a bit of Nyogel conductive lube to the threads, seems to have eliminated the intermittency problem for now.
I’d still like to get one of the new version tailcaps with retaining ring, if they come available.
The cell you tried is probably too long. As a result, the light is not firmly closing the circuit on both sides of the inner tube. Try Sony VTC5, VTC5A or VTC6, or Samsun 30q. All should work fine.
I also had a similar issue with one of my FW3As. When I disassembled the tailcap I discovered that the “nubbin” was about 1/3 longer than my other FW3Xs. I replaced it with a shorter nubbin (I cut a piece off of a spare o-ring of the correct diameter) and the problem went away. It also made the switch feel very nice and tactile.