This is an old beater that's been rather abused... outside looks halfway decent, but it's been attacked by leaky batteries, and had a broken bulb holder/tower for years. Good thing I never throw anything away, huh?
I had a chunk of aluminum left over from... well, who knows. And since 5/8" copper pipe is the same size as a 16mm MCPCB, figured why not hack something together. I have purposely tried to avoid other D-cell Mag build threads just to see if what I come up with is better/worse than what's been done before.
This required ZERO mods to the host, other than cutting off the original plastic bulb tower, and removing anodizing in the tube from the circlip out to the end, so the new pill has good contact for ground and heat transfer. The pill didn't come out exactly the size I wanted, so it's not a pure press-fit retention, but instead is captured by a big c-clip inserted from the front, so the bottom flange on the pill is trapped between the original Mag circlip and the new one. There is NO groove cut in the battery tube for the new c-clip, it's a tight enough fit that it ain't going anywhere on its own but can still be removed later by pressing from the tailcap end with a piece of pipe. The switch comes out like stock, the switch mods are just to remove the original BAT+ spring and fill the spring holder with solder, and for the topside of the switch I used the original chromed-brass lower spring cup with the O.D. flared so as to be a press fit in the top of the switch body. Nothing goes flying across the room when you take the switch out, and there's no fighting with extra wires soldered into the switch or any other messy junk like that.
Pictures!
This was in the early stages... the setscrews were meant to allow adjusting the pillar height for different reflectors without removing the pill from the tube, but the first attempt at making the holes in the body line up with the holes in the pill failed miserably... as did the second attempt. So I gave up on that, and slathered the copper pillar with solder, and filed it down just enough so it's a press fit into the pill. It's still adjustable, but it'd require a bench vise or hydraulic press:
OK, here's a tip: It is impossible to solder the driver into this thing, I had to remove the copper ring (.080" solid wire, flattened to be the same thickness as the driver board, and it fits into an undercut groove in the base of the pill like a snap ring) and tin it, then try again. STILL wouldn't solder; the iron would melt it just enough to weld itself into place and then dump all the heat out and just sit there. I finally had to blast the tip of the iron with a torch, and then bridge a little of the gap, then re-blast, solder, re-blast, solder some more...
Emitter is XM-L U2 (looks to be 6500k, compared to a known-5000k XM-L), the original one from the Solarforce S1100, on a 16mm board with the copper rivets thru the center pad, StinkPAD style.
Keepin' it simple, power from 3 plain alkaline D cells.
Used this reflector from Fasttech...
Fitting the reflector into the unmodified Mag head was pretty straightforward... chop off the threads at the base, open the ID to fit around the copper pillar, trim down the thickness of the outside threads so the Mag bezel would screw on. Used a glass lens leftover from... something. I think an old dead Magcharger.
A centered LED, in a Maglite?!
Bad pics, but trying to show the range of focus adjustment, from as far out as it can go and still cover the o-ring, to fully seated:
I didn't check current at the LED before buttoning it up, but tailcap current is 1.80A with relatively fresh but not-quite-new Duracells. Driver is a 3.04A 105c. Kinda weird having modes on a big D-cell Maglite. I haven't played with it outside yet but it looks to have wider spill (duh, 52mm reflector) than a typical P60/XML but a much smaller hotspot, so even with the textured reflector it'll likely throw better even though it's probably making less overall light.