I’ve tried some reflectors, and at least two TIRs,
some 3mil. some 5mil. XPL2,
some beers,
well today it’s aspheric, lens scratched up the most,
it’s not bright, wont reach far,
but still I must post….
3000k 5mm LED ground and polished plus some silver marker sloppily applied to kill an artifact
Head [dis]assembly.
Took me a while to realize how to make it turn on and off the original way, but it does.
I meant that typically aspheric lights are very inefficient when focused. Optically inefficient.
But 5mm LEDs come in narrow emission variants that could avoid most of the light losses. And despite the fact that the LEDs themselves don’t tend to be efficiency leaders, the whole setup could be fine.
I planned on doing a simple mod of switching out the butterfly XML reflector gasket on my clear S2+ to an XP gasket. The LED was perfectly centered, but I didn’t like how it looked.
When I took it apart, there appeared to be a gap between the LED MCPCB and the pill. When I removed the LED, the thermal compound barely spread. The wire holes in the pill were not chamfered enough to allow the MCPCB to lay flat so I sanded them down.
Everything looked good, but the Samsung LH351D 4000K 90+ CRI beam was still poor (though better than with the original smooth reflector). There were a lot of artifacts and I thought about installing a frosted lens. Then I noticed the reflector looked pretty smooth at the base given that it was OP. I had another spare reflector from a triple build and there was a significant difference between them in regards to OP and how the base spans out (left is the old, right is the new).
The new reflector made a huge improvement! My mod started out as simple, but after several hours I ended up with a much better flashlight.
Not much of a mod, but really tested my patience! I stacked a second current sense resistor on my S12 driver. Could not find the right physical size so had to go one bigger. The first attempt resulted in assembly and current check, still at 6 amps. Took it all apart and worked on the stack a little more and now I get 9.1 amps!!! The Nichia 219C’s at 4000k now look much better and it really does not generate that much more heat.
I really like this light, could almost bring myself to test EDC it.