Hi. Sorry for yet another Skilhunt H04 topic but I couldn’t find some information so I have to ask.
Recently I gave my beloved Zebralight H600w mk.2 to a friend and needed a new headlamp so I tried my luck and ordered Skilhunt H04 with LH351D led after reading about it here on BLF. I didn’t know and was later told by Skilhunt that LH351D is about 0.7x the power outout of XM-L2. Not that I need every lumen possible but for questions’s sake - can I put a different LED or driver without being a nuclear scientist? Sometimes I use it for hunting and T1 on Zebralight was just perfect when searching for wounded game.
Also, I think I’ve read that one can put different angle TIR’s on it to play with beam profile but I can’t find where to buy them and which one actually fit.
I bought it with a BL-135 battery and have few older unprotected NCR-1650GA that I use with other lamps. Do unprotected cells fit H04 and are NCR-18650GA still good enough to power it?
You would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the 850ish lumens or so from the H04 vs. your old Zebralight’s 1000ish in terms of pure output, the way we perceive light is logarithmic and not linear. If 1000 was enough 850 will also be enough.
Get the light in your hand and try it out before you start to worry about swapping LEDs or drivers, but yes the swap on the H04 is not particularly difficult if you have some skill with basic electronics soldering.
Unprotected cells will fit fine, NCR18650GA is still among the best high capacity cells and would be an ideal choice for the H04. The BL-135 it comes bundled with should have similar specs to the NCR18650GA / MJ1 / 35E class, so six of one and half a dozen of the other.
I have a TIR version of the H04, which I like a lot. But I am curious about converting it to non-TIR. If anyone does the conversion, I’d love to see pictures. I’m wondering if doing a conversion make s it look/function like the non-TIR version of the H04, or if there’s some oddities.