What did you mod today?

Not really a mod in any sense, but I was looking through a a case of small AAA/10440 lights I hadn’t opened in a while and found this little Balder 10440 that didn’t seem to work. I took off the top and an old style XP-G was loose and rattling around. There seemed to be hardly any solder on the pads at all. I found an XP-G2 on an old aluminum star from some failed experiment and reflowed it onto the 9mm Balder MCPCB. It’s working very nicely now. I forgot about this stash of tiny lights. I just don’t have much use for them except to play with once a year or so.

It is always satisfying to repair an old light, even when it may be obsolete (which this one is not) and not in use. :slight_smile:

I must say, I am starting to appreciate the small lights. I think the drivers and led’s are much better now, so they are more useful. Sounds like a fun box of stuff!

Finally got my old Sunwayman V10a working.

This is a 1xAA magnetic ring flashlight with a cool-white XPG. I dropped the head during a battery change 1 month after I got it (several years ago). Something popped off the driver and it never worked since. I tried the thing back on, but wasn’t sure if I got the orientation right and it didn’t work.

Tried it again today and realized it actually DOES work … but the boost circuit is fried. It still works properly on 14500. That’s good enough for me … pretty much all my lights only run on li-ion anyways.

Build quality of the casing of this light looks incredible. Probably the best looking anodizing of any light I’ve ever owned. It’s nice to have it working again.

Next step will be to replace the old cool-white XPG with something better. Maybe an XPG2. Or perhaps I could use an XML2, XPL, or 219C. These other emitters would require a larger reflector, which I could salvage from my broken V10r.

Future mods:
I’m thinking of buying a Jetbeam RC16 or RC26 and converting it to a FET triple.

If I do this with the RC16 I’d want to fit an 18500 cell inside.
If I do this with the RC26 I’d want to use the human lathe method to shorten the body tube so the light is more compact/

My second Bestfire 9-led mod, my first serious high output one, and by far the most expensive mod I have ever done. It is a bit scary to put 50 dollars worth of XP-L Hi's in a light fully risking to blow them all up at some point. I have not read many other SRK-mods (I was never too fond of SRK's because I did not like the looks of the original design), and I'm a lazy efficient modder so I'm sure things could have been done better here and there..

I wanted this to be a warm white flooder, and I had done a few mods with the 7A1 XP-L Hi and I liked the tint very much. They came from Mouser though, and I did not like the idea of their shipping costs again, so I bought 10x 7A2's from Kaidomain. A bit less rosy, but the 7A1 has very much of that, so this tint is very nice too.

A few old pictures of the stock light:

The stock light puts out 1500 lumen, with about 7A current. They put whatever driver they have at hand in this light, I had three of these lights in my hands thusfar, with three different drivers. The one from this mod has almost the driver in the picture above, minus the second FET (the solder pads for it were empty), and minus the R100 (it was already bridged).

*1) I have no SRK-type drivers at hand, so the stock driver had to be beefed-up, because this mod was going to have high current. So I soldered a second FET on the empty pads, one of my scarse leftover Vishay 70NO2 FETS. I made an extra solder bridge from the FET-source pad to the ground, and I filled those tiny via's in the ground ring on the right with solder. The stock ledwires were 24AWG, I changed them to 18AWG.

*2) bypassing the battery-minus-springs and improving the connection from the tailboard to the body. The two tiny screws that carry the current in the stock light were made from iron, the shelf for the board is anodised so all current gous through those screws, with even the greater part of the screw-holes in the body anodised on the inside. So I tapped two new screw-holes in the body and added two extra brass screws (the board had the two extra via's for the extra screws already). And I made an extra electrical connection to the batt-minus circuitry in the middle.

*3) I'm using the stock 9-led ledboard. It is not a DTP-board, but I want maxiumum 3A per led, so that should be alright. The only problem with it that more than 20A is delivered to the board and with the current then spread out via an artistic maze to the 9 leds, there were not too wide traces at the start of the distribution that carried the full current. So I made two copper-strip bypasses so that no trace carries more than half the total current. On the picture also the XP-L Hi leds are reflowed already, and the copper plate can be seen under the board (see nr 4)

*4) The 2mm thick aluminium ledboard sits on a fairly wide shelf in the body, but it is not the full diameter so only a 2mm edge is touching it. Moreover, when tightening the head, the ledboard is not pushed against its shelf, instead the reflector is pushed against the head. With the increased heat in this mod I had to thicken-up the ledboard anyway, so I made a copper shelf under the ledboard from two 1mm thick copper disks soldered together and then screwed against the ledboard with a very thin layer of Arctic Silver in between. Everything was made very very flat so that the contact was optimal. The larger of the copper discs (full inner diameter of the head sits on the ledboard shelf now (again with thin Arctic Silver in between), with the smaller disc fitting tight in the cavity. Now the heat-path to the shell was very much improved and with the 1mm added tickness of the assembly the copper is pushed firmly to its shelf.

That's all. It took me 5 hours yesterday (tail-work, ledboard reflow and work, driver mod), and a couple of hours today (copper disc-work and assembly and testing), to give you an estimate how expensive this light has become ;-)

Three nice pictures to make the light look more amazing than it is:

The performance:

First the crappy but useful UI, which is stock: off -> high -> 25%low(low-freq.PWM) -> off. There's a green led under the switch and when the light is already clearly dimming because the batteries are getting low, the green led turns red (as if I did not already knew :tired: ). And there's no shut-down or anything, the batteries keep draining. I stopped when the light on high was only just 16 lumen, the batteries were 2.58V (resting voltage) by then. So the batteries are finally saved by the led-voltage, but this will be worse with 219C's.

The output. All the resistance that I removed has payed off, the current on 4 freshly loaded Panasonic NCR18650BD cells (semi-high drain) was 24A ! (2.6A/led) :-) , so this is a 90W flashlight. I think the main leftover resistance in the system is the thoroid on the driver (what does it do anyway??), all current goes through it. The OTF output is 5600 cosy warm djozz-lumens at start-up and after 30 seconds it was 4750 lumen :-) , and quite stable after that, the heat-path works well ! After two minutes the light is too hot to hold, but on the low setting (1650 lumen) the produced heat is nicely sustainable.

A white wall shot at 4 meter distance. The camera was on auto-exposure to show the beam pattern, in reality it is an impressive wall of light:

I think this light is a succes, at least very impressive and I love the tint. I will not likely be doing another mod as expensive as this one, XP-L Hi's are nice, but there are other very nice leds out there that are 3 times as cheap.

If the light keeps working as it is doing now, it is a candidate for swapping in some future amazing BLF-originating SRK-type driver!

Amazing mod djozz. Loving your work.

I finally got back to my Courui mod after running into a few issues. Everything is working great so far, I just have to mess around with the focus a bit.

Thanks for the compliment Steve!

(you always make me feel guilty for not showing as much appreciation for other people’s work as you always do!)

Great light djozz. I got worried when I saw you were using the stock LED board, but then relieved when I saw you jumpered the traces. Every time I kept the stock SRK (type) LED board, and boosted the juice, I kept losing emitters. Yup, the traces kept burning up on me faster than I could repair them.

Awesome mod djozz, it’s always nice to see something that wasn’t designed to be good, being improved massively like this.




Today I modded a Maratac copper AAA with Richard’s 12mm single side FET driver (gruppydriv rev.2 fw) and Nichia 219C.

The driver is currently on sale here: MTN Group Discount Thread - Current Deal: MTN-slDD Driver

Stock LED and driver:

Before vs After, In the photos the 1.6mm thick driver is shown, but I actually ended up using the 0.8mm one. I had to reflow the nichia 219C into the stock mcpcb because the 10mm sinkpad couldn’t clear the reflector base:

Not necessary, but I added a solder blob top and a ring of solder to improve ground contact.

This is the 5000k 70CRI+ version of the 219C, as you would expect the tint is not as nice as the warmer high CRI one but I used this because of the low Vf, it allows it to pull higher amps on a 10440 compared to a XP-G2. According to my ceiling bounce test it makes about 750lm with a fresh efest 10440, on turbo the heat can be felt immediately.

I haven't done a Maratac AAA, but I know that Vinh uses the Sinkpad on them so there's got to be a way.

Times Two!

Great mod djozz! Glad you posted this and great pics!

Triple 219bt 45K 90+ CRI w/ CU spacer both from mtn into an S8. I used a med frosted carclo but did not like it. Switched to clear narrow and much much better. Mtn 17DD + 1 w/bistro. L2 brown box clone XHP N4 1C and TR 100 driver. Momentary and Turbo only. Ba#ls to the wall serious only.

I installed an XP-L HI emitter in a thrunite ti, upgraded the wires and repaired the mode switch tab which had broken off by soldering a copper bridge over the outer contacts, works two modes again.

Then an 11mm FET driver & tiny alu heatsink into a thrunite ti xmas edition, pulls around 3.8A on startup. :slight_smile:

Finally Nitecore EX11 v2 triple 219c all black with copper heatsink.

a/ impressing mod.
b/ Late Night Show :slight_smile:
c/ nice collection
d/ is that a 12” Remington Standard?

Some nice modding going on here!

I think there's quite a few here that deserve their own threads as well.

I'm planning a "Poor Man's M43" build, but it's not so "poor" when you start adding up all of the emitters, & then realize that they could all go "pop"

I reflowed an XM-L2 5C onto a DTP board and put it into my Kronos X6. The tint is great, and the beam pattern is perfect.

I modded my B158.

I swapped in an XP-L HI 3B reflowed onto a Sinkpad, added 22 gauge wire, a MTN-17DDm driver, lighted tailcap, and bypassed springs.

That was my second reflow ever, and I’m so happy I didn’t mess it up!

I painted the top of the pill a flat black to minimize any artifacts (Thanks pilotdog68 for the paint brand!). Man is it hard to use that stuff without ruining the finish.

I get 5.5-7 amps at the tail from it, and 169600cd. So about 824 meters of throw.

CRX you are seriously busy at the moment, great work!

All I did today was centre the led in two BLF A01…

Does this count as a mod?

It is a Remington Standard, it does not say 12” anywhere but perhaps the 16 means it is a 16” ?
Found it on the street 10 years ago, still works, my son finds it much fun, he is just starting learning to read!

S2+ with a qlite (mtne) + 7 7135s (double) 16mm XHP50 U4 1C 2 keeppower 750s. You can’t keep it on high very long but it sure will give you a laugh. L/MedHigh/TurboHigh. A LOT of light. I am still laughing. Carry some batteries for backup! File, file, and file the driver retaining ring. Everyone should have at least one.