My Astrolight S41 Nichia and 18650 tube from Banggood arrived yesterday. Everything passed inspection and worked perfectly.
I’d also ordered a Manker E14 XPG from Amazon. My plan was to mod the E14 and leave the S41 as-is.
…. good thing too. Moment I took the E14 out of the box I could see there is a problem. Looks like one of the LEDs is dedomed. Looks like Manker needs to invest a little more heavily in QA.
So it will be a new (different) code? Should we just keep checking your spreadsheet?
Would be an interesting build drilling a cavity in the side of the copper heatsink and then installing an electronic sideswitch. Not sure it would be very practical though as that heatsink gets HOT in a heavily driven light… and unfortunately there aren’t any e-switch drivers with temp sensors available for purchase.
I prefer the tint and the increased lux on my 3D S1/A6 over the S41, but the S41 has a nicer beam pattern.
Is your S41 XPG-2 or 219B?
Got home today and tried out my Manker E14 XPG2.
From looking into the optic with the light off I noticed at first glance that there was clearly something wrong with one of the emitters as it didn’t have the same yellow phosphor visible. I guessed this was because of an accidental factory dedome. After I got home I removed the bezel and optic. All 4 XPG2s were in place and were not dedomed. However, only 3 of them lit up when power was applied. The 4th refused to turn on. The problem looks like a defective reflow at the factory. One of the emitters was angled slightly and wasn’t making connection.
Not too big a deal anyways since I’d purchased this light with the goal of replacing all the emitters with XPL HI or XPG3 anyways. I unfortunately hadn’t ordered enough XPG3, so I went with XPL HI. Reflow was accomplished without a hitch and all 4 emitters (now XPL HI) work fine. As a precaution, I reversed the polarity of the emitters on the star and the driver wires.
I had also planned to replace the stock driver with an H17F, but I ran into a problem: The stock driver is very firmly glued in place. This seems dumb to me… why glue the driver in place when the light has a driver retaining ring.
I wasn’t able to remove the driver by pulling the spring with a tweezers. Nor was I able to remove it by pressing through the LED leadwire hole with a thin screwdriver or narrow awl. If I really want to remove the driver it looks like I may have to use a blowtorch to melt the glue, or drill out and destroy the driver with a power drill. A blowtorch might damage the finish coating on the copper so the drill may be the safest option. There’s little risk the drill would damage the structure of the light, but it would destroy a perfectly good BLF A6 driver.
I ended up reassembling the light with 4XPL HI using the stock driver. I’ll decide what to do about replacing the driver later. My initial impressions of the light with just the emitter swap (no spring bypasses yet):
I got the 219B. It just seems to have a little green shift compared the 3D XPL I have. Maybe it’s due to the optic or bin.
opened my s41 today to bypass the spring and change the emitter wires to 20 awg . Just my normal modding stuff , it was working perfectly before .
Copper… Head weight , with everything removed … 51g
Here you can see the shelf the driver sits on , and you can see it has actually some copper mass under it (not empty like A6)!
And the top side :
The copper shelf that the mcpcb is under , in the middle (not right or left of the sides of the driver as seen on picture 2) its 2mm thick .
Thanks G, nice to see inside.
One thing to remember is that if the copper is getting really really hot, the transfer to air is faster. The larger the difference between ambient and object the faster the transfer rate. The copper is so thermally efficient, it’s spreading that emitter heat nearly instantaneously, so it get’s uncomfortable to touch very fast.
I’ve had a Titanium Ring, a Tungsten Carbide ring, and of course, 14K Gold. If you touch a piece of ice to these different metal rings you can feel the speed of conduction as the cold travels around to the other side. Like Gold, Cu will move it throughout in an instant, surprising when you can feel it in that context. A large Aluminum heat sink will remove heat from a piece of metal in a big hurry, the better the contact between em the faster it goes. I use a 3x3x3 cube at the work table to set a newly re-flowed driver or mcpcb on, it cools enough to pick up within a few seconds.
Just saying it’s all relevant and a sink can take quite a heat dump but it can also fill up while waiting for ambient air to remove excess. 
That’s a nice piece of cooper!
I haven’t pulled the trigger on the E14 or S41… Not sure what I’m waiting for, a host version perhaps?
Is there a retaining ring holding the driver in? Seems like someone said the driver was glued in, could be remembering that out of context…
In my S41 the driver is held in by a retainer ring. Pop’s out with a piercer, don’t even have to use needle noose pliers. Small detail: it has a normal thread, so turn it loose in the opposite direction of the tailcap retainer ring.
Just like the A6 and other quality flashlights there is a ring , not even a drop of glue.
I’m betting Firelights is pressed in, they hate filing off the slag where the boards break apart. I bet it’s pressed in so tight he can’t budge it.
I had the same problem on my X5 , it was just the pcb of the driver which was a little bigger in the sides . (the place it connects in the panel on the factory)
Nope. Have no intention to remove the driver. But when the retainer ring is loosened, the driver + spring gets “wobbly”. Maybe not the best choice of words, because English is not my first language. Can it be that the remainders of the spots where the driver comes out of the “production-sheet” were not properly filed off. So the driver has to be pushed in its seat with force and gets stuck?
edit: what am I still doing here?
For comparison, the copper sink I just recently stuffed into a BTU Shocker weighs 397 grams. 
With driver and led ?
A quad copper X5 with a copper heatsink would be great . Ordered the heatsink/spacer from kiriba-ru , now it’s time fornthe copper X5
Yep, the first Al X5 prototype got Quadded and sent to Connecticut for field testing. It’s still there, impressing Park Rangers on a regular basis. The second Al Quad I did for JohnnyMac, have made multiples in the copper and Al X5’s since, including the one sent to Neal that inspired this S41. His was the first one I threaded the pill into the head for easy removal, knowing he was going to dissect it.
Pretty sure that first one, with XP-L emitters, did ~3030 lumens. The rest are kind of a blur, too many lights, too many similarities.