BLF Kronos X6/X5 GB - Group Buy now closed.

One of the best things I ever did around here was choose "KeepingItLight" as my handle. I love its double meaning. More than once it has reminded me not to overreact to something I read in the forums.

Helps me keep my food on my plate.

Same situation here.

Thanks, Rufus, I’ve been trying to be better overall. Besides, I’m already heavily involved in and all out revolt someplace else and don’t have the energy to engage on two fronts.

I’d also like to say that Brett’s last couple of posts probably more accurately articulated my personal feelings. It was well said, Brett.

I should have added in that last post some impressions about the lights. I know it’s been only 24 hours, but as an experienced flashlight guy, some things are already obvious.

First, the moon mode is perfect. I have a dark house and a Maine Coon who likes to sneak if front of you and flop down in your path. I get up at 2:30 AM and need to find clothes and make my way back down stairs all without waking up the family. Because of these conditions, I need moon for nocturnal navigation.

Second, the tail cap is very bright. I had to put it on the floor under the bed just to go to sleep. That said, everyone that’s seen it, including people who don’t care a wit about flashlights- like my MIL- have all been extremely impressed by this one feature.

And, finally, after playing with them outside their performance will indeed make you giggle. To me, being somewhat jaded, this is pretty much the ultimate test. When you can’t help but laugh and say, “This thing is ridiculous.”, then you know you have a winner.

What about those Kronos battery wrappers?

I must be losing my mind or something, so many things that don’t make sense anymore.

I worked with Stainless Steel on guns from the late 80’s with a gunsmith. I DO know a little something about galling. It takes wear to produce a galling effect. And pressure. Wear, especially on a flashlight, takes hundreds if not thousands of uses in typical normal situations. It could be possible for a thread to be manufactured too snugly, in which case galling would occur quicker. But in 10 uses? Seriously? I call bs.

And I’ve personally built over 30 of the X6 lights, I have 14 sitting right here. I’ve done all sorts of things with them. I have yet to see a reflector cloud up. Not at 17Amps with an SBT-70, not at 7Amps with an XM-L2, not with a de-domed XP-G2 making 103Kcd. Sure is surprising to me that I’ve never heard of these things happening, and they all seem to happen to one particular person in the UK. I’m not trying to be hateful or blameful or anything like that, I’m just astounded at what you keep reporting Sharpie. Maybe you’re some kind of Anti-Flashaholic bad-things-happen-to-me-magnet or something. I don’t know what it is. Thousands of the EEX6 and this reflector have been put out there in BLF Group Buys. Thousands. And right away, within the first dozen uses, you get all the bad stuff. Essence F or something, there’s a common denominator somewhere there. Just trying to figure it out, is all. After years of researching and finding answers, you come along and try to debunk everything in a couple of weeks. From O-rings to centering rings, emitters to reflectors. Doesn’t add up to me, but I don’t understand women either and I’ve spent 29 years married…

Blue light is not conducive to sleep? Really? Man, I must be doing something wrong. I always close my eyes to sleep and I sleep quite well that way. (FWIW, I have a background illumination multi-color LED light on my wall, ready to grab for a shoot, and it’s been acting as my before bedtime nightlight for about a year now. I keep it set to a deep blue that’s dang near a blacklight, making colors fluoresce. This is usually on for 30 minutes to an hour before I got to bed EVERY night. Sleep just fine. Why such a deep blue? It is so low key it doesn’t disturb my 8 yr old son, sleeping in the next room.) Yet another thing for me to not understand. Seems to me that I spent every daylight hour out in the sunshine, blue light, for about 18 years, and slept like a rock. (why do people say “slept like a baby”? Babies are notorious for not sleeping through the night.) A slight blue glow from a miniscule LED under a rubber boot can damage sleep rythms? My wife has French origins, amongst others, and she’s hyper sensitive to power-on lights as well. Hmmmmm…. maybe there’s a certain allocation of rods and cones that are distributed slightly different in some people, making this blue light an issue. I think my wife’s eyelids are transparent, she seems to be able to see the slightest amount of light as a disturbance, even with her eyes closed. For real, I had to put 5% limo tint on our bedroom windows and buy special room darkening blinds as well. (these are cut to a more exacting standard, eliminating the gaps that allow light through) I have to turn lights on in here to read anything in broad daylight on an outstandingly beautiful blue sky day, even with the blinds open!

To each his/her own, there is a good assortment of colors of LED’s available for very little monies if an evil red or putrid green is required to make one feel better. I just bought an assorted kit for $13 with 8 colors and 20 of each. And a neat little book of assorted resistors to fine tune their output, 4250 resistors for $29. (really! 170 values, 25 of each value.) Fine tuning and tweaking should be relatively easy to accomplish.

The bigger the pond, the wider the assortment of fish within it. As BLF grows, in part because of some outstanding group buys, the disparity amongst our members shows brighter all the time. Such is life, I suppose.

Thanks cone, I was just about to tell you how much I liked your posts :slight_smile: I did detect that we were likely on the same page here.

This is all going to be anecdotal because, well, I’m too lazy to do the research. I too have heard/read that blue light is bad for sleeping. Something about our bodies being predisposed to wakefulness around blue light. The opposite for red light. Our bodies are supposed to want to relax and get ready for sleep. Additionally, we’re supposed to prefer complete darkness for sleeping because, well, that’s what people lived with for thousands of years. I think this is also why warmer tint lights are recommended for bedrooms and cooler tints are recommended for kitchens and living rooms, etc.

I’m not stating this is fact but on this issue my “understanding” seems to be similar to Sharpie.

Picked up my SS/CU set #128 box #128

Box had small damage on all 4 corners as others have reported.
A little foam around the ends of the box would have prevented this damage.

No damage to the lights from shipping other than the lights were out of their slots.
A piece of foam inside the box would have kept the lights in place.

Lights look GREAT, no shipping damage and all machine work is very good.

So for me this was a great GB and I am very pleased.

Have not had time to work on the UI but will this weekend.

Thanks for all the time and effort put into this GB by everyone involved :slight_smile:

One last thing to add that in the next GB for the UI could we make it have respond to “Voice Commands”

At this moment I can hear the sound of a wireless mouse aimed at my head from the deak of TK

The blue light thang is pretty well documented.

From the Harvard Medical School web site:

Your mileage may vary, past performance is not an indicator of future earnings, yada yada yada.

Guess maybe things are not always as they appear then. I wonder how many millions of people Harvard studied for they’re research? Results are always skewed by the data presented. Wonder too about all the hundreds of thousands (more?) of people that work the night shift, sleep in the daytime. Or that live in constantly illuminated cities, like NYC or Vegas. In spite of all that’s bad for us, people are living longer than ever before. Amazing, when you think about it.

Copper makes your hands stink, uh, quite the contrary. Your hands make copper stink! I have recently found out that it’s the breakdown of your body oils on the metal that produces the smell, the copper itself doesn’t smell. I also have it on good authority that the use of Tellurium Copper eliminates this aspect of handling a copper product.

If a diamond is the most electrically conductive material on earth, would it benefit a modder to use a 12 mm simulated diamond as a heat sink? (about 6 carats, $108) If it failed to help a modified flashlight run cool, would the wife wear a 6 carat diamond (sim) ring?

Probably no one would guess that I drink coffee in a 30 oz mug.

Received mine today.

All I can say is Thankyou to Kronos, Bugsy and all others involved.

The lights are stunning, none of the amazing pictures even come close to doing these things justice once you get them in hand.

Please please don’t be put off by any negative comments, the finished product is a special achievement

So…ah…ya…my comment about the brightness of the tail cap was merely an observation.

I’d appreciate a pointer when someone comes up with ways to change the tailcap LED.

The Harvard page cited above is a good introduction, if you want one.

Your Melatonin May Vary.
No one person’s experience is the whole truth about how the world works.
Science finds what personal experience and anecdotes fail to discover.
Detailed recordkeeping over time reveals what individual experience fails to discover.
Your experience differs. Other people are not wrong when their report differs.

Your Opinion May Vary,
Contents May Have Settled,
Only White Male Subjects Tested This Drug,
No Immediate and Acute Danger to Human Life …

Hate to interrupt, but just fyi for those modders/techies interested --

The driver in these lights is effectively a "FET+1" driver, but enhanced by using a more advanced Atmel MCU: ATTiny25 instead of the usual ATTiny13A, like in the BLF A6 lights. The extra memory and temperature sensor built in to the "25" allowed us (ahhh TK) to write more advanced firmware than what we had in the BLF A6.

For the cap on these drivers, we've been using 10 uF cap since the beginning for all our custom drivers, FET or linear regulated. We've seen problems on "25" drivers with high amps and I found that doubling up on the cap, 20 uF effectively, eliminated the flaky problem. So I pulled off the C1 cap on one of these new light drivers and tested it -- it appears to be a 12 uF cap as best as I can tell.

So the bump from 10 uF to 12 uF appeared to solve the problems the manufacturer was having originally on this driver. Kind of makes sense - proably best to keep the cap as small as possible, but still allowing the driver/MCU to function properly.

Not meaning to be at odds, really. I just don’t understand why/how things are happening to you as a noob that haven’t/don’t happen to anyone else. I have no idea what you’re seeing over there across the pond, want to understand, try to understand, if for no other reason than to try to keep it from happening to ME! :stuck_out_tongue:

The reflector and lens fogging could be from something in the thermal paste used heating up and vaporizing. I don’t know. I know the paste used on mine is grey and sort of watery, and very little of it, so I’m cleaning it off and using Arctic Alumina Thermal Paste.

I’m gonna talk to my new buds that make simulated diamonds and see if I can get a disc instead of a faceted cut stone. :wink: Sells by the carat, regardless of cut, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be accommodating. :slight_smile: First I have to financially recover from all these group buys and replacing the engagement ring my wife “lost”. I knew once I put down the money on a replacement, the original would get jealous and rear it’s head… yep, found the lost engagement ring, the new one is being made as we speak. Go figure.

Science named our planets. Science then decided one was just a rock. So every kid that went to school was told we had 9 planets in our Solar System. Then they decided to downsize one, after the fact, and now we have “8” planets. There’s Science for you, always changing, adapting to the new data coming in. So, is anything actual, matter of factual? Or do the scientists simply shift and adapt at will as new things are discovered? Eggs are good for you. No, wait! Eggs are bad for you! Uh, hold that thought, eggs are good for you again unless you have cholesterol problems. How are we ever to really know what’s what?

How many people are on Earth? How many people were in Harvard’s sleep experiment? So the data is based on a minuscule percentage of available test subjects? Once again, subject to change. So, what IS normal? It’s a misleading concept.

Not very long ago, normal was a nicely made flashlight with all the goodies glued inside, no access. :wink: Not so very long ago, normal was 100 lumens. (Surefire still believes in this, by the way… both the glue and the weak lumens high price concept)

Science learns of a lot of really cool and essential stuff. The guys/gals at myth busters blow most of it up. :wink:

Thanks Tom, now I’m wondering if they substituted for the OTC as well…

I posted about my experience swapping these in comment 5156. Happy to answer questions if I can but you’d probably get better answer from PD and the rest of the guys in the lighted tailcap thread.

Slightly better shot of my modded tailcaps:

Yeah, diamond is actually an insulator, not electrically conductive at all, but great thermal conductivity. Basically you could coat whole drivers or such with it, if you can afford.

I have had some “milky/cloudy” lenses in 5 Convoy L2’s and just couldn’t get rid of it. Tried pure water, water with dishwashing detergent, glass cleaner and ethyl alcohol… What else could I try? Don’t want to pay 20$ with shipping for an UCLp lens…

Sharpie, that optics cleaner that you’re using, do you have a link for me, please? thx