I bought 8 C01Rs, 2 for me and the rest for gifting. With the beam being unusable in my judgement i had to find an easy way to modify the optic. 4 of the heads unscrewed with finger power only and 4 wouldn’t unscrew but the ones i could unscrew all required slightly different amounts of power with one being very loose indeed so i won’t know if the other 4 are glued or just tight until i tools on them.
On the left is a C01R with an optic that i sanded with 80 grit paper (all i had access to, crude but does the job though i’d recommend finer paper if you go down this route), it was the first one i did and while it is muuuch better than the default optic and perfectly usable i find it to be a little too diffuse. I’ll keep this one for me.
In the middle is a more lightly sanded optic, still with 80 grit but i tested the beam pattern regularly until i reached the amount of diffusion i wanted, the hotspot is brighter than the heavily sanded one but there’s still a nice transition and enough spill for context. I’ve already gifted this one and will do the others like this one.
On the right is an unmolested C01R.
Optics:
Beam:
Over-exposed for emphasis:
Left C01R vs Lumintop EDC01 with 3500K sst-20, both on medium mode:
At some point i want to try swapping the EDC01/unmodified C01R optics to see what the beams are like.
I use Panasonic NiMHs and bought some 500mAh Ikea Laddas for the gifting, lower capacity but cheap and should handle more recharges/abuse. Unfortunately the Ladda pictured below gets stuck in the C01R battery tube!
So i had to gift one with the Panasonic instead.
As you can see from the second picture there’s not much difference at all (i’m away from my tools atm so couldn’t measure the diameters):
All in all though i LOVE this little light!