BLF A6 FET+7135 Light Troubleshooting and Mod thread

If you are just looking for a budget clip that rides LOW in the pocket, buy one of THESE clips, find an O-Ring or two that fit your light in the clip groove and put them together….

It has worked for me for several months now with no real major issues, the M1 is a bit long for anything other than cargo pockets. My stock Eagle Eye A6 had no clip, just a lanyard, so this is what I came up with, works on a variety of lights. Almost total concealment of the light if that is what you want…

We are all hoping that Manker makes Clip V2 a bit better. I have not had any brittle clips, and have adjusted all of mine with pliers with no breakage (albeit carefully).

If you want to re-temper your light, try your home oven on a high setting (400F +) for a couple of hours, worst it will do is make it softer….



The NCR18650GA are Protected, and they'll give you longer runtime.

The Samsung INR18650-30Q will give you a brighter/higher output, but shorter runtime, and they are Not protected.

Depends on what you want or need.

If you already have the 18650GA's I would not worry about it. The 30Q will help get the most out of it but that is the difference between cruising at 90mph and 110mph....you are already up there and may not "see" any difference.

Some people have had success breaking the tabs off the two clips on the sides using pliers. If you can snap those off that way, without having to bend it, then you have brittle metal. Depending on how you feel about those tabs, it seems that would be a “safe” way to check. From what some people have been saying, if your clip is brittle and you don’t fix it somehow it will break during normal usage.

My clip doesn’t seem brittle. I just took it off and flexed it somewhat more than you’d expect to ever subject it to.

The tight “u” bend is a poor design; increasing that radius 50% would make it 100 times less likely to break there. There’s still a lot of ‘art’ in tempering flat springs even with the exactness of today’s technology, so the best ‘fix’ is simply a replacement, hopefully coming from a better batch.

Phil

Holy crap! I just tried out my new 30q’s. My lights got too hot to hold! And my hands are pretty calloused! I’m sure my dmm sucks because amperage was high 4’s and I’m pretty sure I had that with my 26f’s. My lights have never ran that hot before. Pretty fun! I’m going to go wake up some neighbors. :evil:

FWIW, if it’s too hot to hold it probably needs to be stepped down.

Thanks TK! Yes I definitely wasn’t waiting on the timer. I didn’t want to mess them up. By the way. Timing was about the same as with the 26f’s. Needed to hit the switch about twice as fast as you are used to to cycle modes. I know people said these will drain faster but wouldn’t they be better than my 2600mah (vs 3000mah 30q) as I long as I stick with the regulated modes?

OK buddy you talked me into it. I was trying to get mine to be more circular. One side of both my clips had too small a circumference. I got that fixed so I moved on to the winglets. Snapped one. I’m gonna try 350 f in my little toaster oven. And then try another wing.

BTW. What were your results?

Note the tempering recommended at instructables is in Centigrade units.
175-350°C

and do read up on it a bit, it’s recommended to put the hot metal into ashes or sand (dry, preheated so there’s no moisture in it)
That limits the rate at which it cools down.
After that sanding and polishing to eliminate surface cracking.

It’s rocket science — doing it right. You’ll find a lot of failure analysis reports discussing how to do it wrong

Thanks hank! I converted 175c trying to get the less brittle setting. And I’m off to finish a few articles about it.

Or just turn the oven off while leaving the clip in…. It is insulated and cools slower than just pulling the clip out. This is not Rocket Science as we do not have a way TO do it right, yet… Some improvement however, is improvement in this case…

At times, too much information can be paralyzing… Thus the success of Nike’s “Just Do It” advertising campaign…

Oops I just realized higher temp= less brittle. Doh!

Yes, more mAh should mean longer runtime, at least on the low / med modes. The effective mAh value changes with higher current though, so a high-drain cell might last longer on high than a high-capacity cell.

Ok here we go. 20 minutes at 350f and another hour at 500f. Another hour to cool. Not much happened…. the other wing snapped off with about the same amount of pressure or maybe less! I’m not really going to try to understand the science of tempering as I feel my plate is full enough just trying to understand drivers! Feel free to chime in if you know what I could have done differently. But I’m still happy with the result after a little grinding and sanding.

My results won’t prove anything. :frowning: With a fair amount of twisting pressure applied to one of the tabs, it bent a little and didn’t break. The reason I say it won’t prove anything is that I failed to try breaking it before re-tempering. I don’t know if it was ever brittle to begin with. :~ Thanks for trying with yours. By the way, if the Instructables article is to be believed, it is supposed to be at temp for 1.5 hours and then slowly cooled. It could be that you just didn’t get it hot enough for long enough. I set my oven to 500F when I did mine. I put the clip in at the start so it would heat with the oven, and set the timer for two hours. If yours is still brittle, you may want to bake it again, hotter and longer. You don’t have any tabs left to break off for testing, but getting it done a little better may keep your clip from self-testing (breaking) in the future. :wink:

My references are stored elsewhere and it’s been a long time ago, but IIRC the rate of heating is rather unimportant; the rate of cooling (quenching) can be critical, and the shock of cooling to quickly crystallizes the metal structure which is what causes brittleness. Some alloys will do OK cooling slowly, some need a more rapid but controlled initial quenching to avoid softening. It’s not as simple as the instructables thing would have you believe, but you might succeed with dumb luck and the worst that can happen is that you end up with a brittle or too-soft clip so go for it.

IMHO this is not a well designed spring; there are too many sharp radii and that is where stresses concentrate. That doesn’t mean it can’t work well but it does make perfect tempering a lot more critical and tougher to achieve. Good luck!

Phil

Quote DavidEF: "With a fair amount of twisting pressure applied to one of the tabs, it bent a little and didn't break"

This ^

I broke both of my tabs off while holding firmly in tabletop vice. The snap wasn't immediate had to wiggle each couple times. So at least the two little wings seemed to not be that brittle.

Thanks. The Instructables article does talk about quenching first for hardness then doing the tempering to keep it from being too brittle. And they are talking about a knife, not a clip which is bent in several places and is going to be under daily stress. So yeah, it may not be the best application of that Instructables article. :stuck_out_tongue:

My zebralight sc52w has a clip that screws on. Which light are you referring to?