Nice. I hadn’t even considered coloured nichias. From the video it looks slightly more cherry red than the XPE2. How is the heat handling with the sawed off pill?
Do nichia make any weird colours I don’t know about? Im looking for something different to try.
Make a triple with 1 red, 1 green and 1 blue LED. Maybe the output will blend into white light :sunglasses:
Actually if that worked and you had the right driver it could make for a neat light: run each LED separately to have only red, blue or green. Or run them all together for white. All in the same light.
Or if you really want to go to the next level and have MAD programming and engineering skills, you could have the output of each LED vary. If you did it right you could end up with a variable brightness variable color light able to output any color in the visible spectrum.
These colour 219B’s are only recently on the market, I found them at leds.de (=Lumitronics). They are indeed just slightly more red than the red XP-E2 (630nm vs 625nm), but I do not see a real difference.
I made it because I teach my (yearly) school project again with camera obscura’s and old-school blackandwhite photographic paper. This makes quite perfect darkroom lighting.
There’s a whole branch of commercial research devoted to that, and making all colours and good quality white requires quite specific leds. I will look up a small article that I read about it from Lumileds.
Nice job djozz. I’m not sure though that you did not want to just show of your soldering skills. Yes the soldering looks nothing like I do. More like Tom E’s. 
TRUSTFIRE A8 (26650 quad)
This is an older light that came out in the early days of the 26650. It’s certainly a well made light by the actual Trusfire company. Lot of attention to detail and beautiful machining. In fact, it had enough interest to have a BLF Edition group buy, then faded from memory, never to be mentioned or heard from again.
What happened? I don’t really know, but since it was the times before direct thermal path mcpcbs and FET drivers, it never really achieved its potential. Basically a very chunky light with an average beam and long run time.
Personally, I never liked the way they recessed the lens way down deep below the bezel. The same reason I don’t like the Convoy M2.
I was thinking of grinding down the bezel to a thin ring and bringing the lens forward, but I wasn’t sure about my capabilities of filing down stainless steel with my hand tools and perhaps wrecking the whole light, so I left it.
Time to get started on my balcony workshop.
It’s getting there.
For some reason, my calculations were off by 7mm, so I had to cut a second slug.
Although lined with a brass ring, the pill had one of those very shallow recesses for a press fit, so I built a mountain FET driver using one of the extra thin pcbs that RMM offers.
I drilled the hole through the center of the board myself to bring the positive lead up through the spring.
Just fiddling about and killing time
There! That thin PCB fits in there perfectly flush.
They even thought to add a nice delrin driver cover that threads in there. Very tidy.
Tpad with 4 x XP-G3 S5 3A and 22 AWG Teflon wires.
35mm Khatod quad optic sanded down to 30mm.
I knew my heatsink was tall enough, but when I had everything tightened down something was rattling around in there. The leg pins of the optic were a little too long for the Tpad so the apertures were standing too high above the emitters, so I just sanded them down a little.
All my 26650 were inside other lights, so I just used the only one I had available in my box. Some older green Sony cell.
It gave me 16A on high. Even with the light running, the larger 26650 cell seemed to have no problem holding at 16A on high with the FET driver.
Maybe not an everyday EDC light, but a good out of doors jacket pocket light.
You could try carrying it in your trousers but…
Thats a nice mod Of. Its a shame the lights no longer made. I gave one to dad years ago when they came out and its the most abused looking thing you would see and the thing just keeps on going.
Actually they still make them. They even have them at FastTech. They must be original because I see they still stock them in the official Trustfire store.
Thanks Of. Thats good to know.
Nice work Ouch!! That should make a good one!
TL
Nice mod Ouchy :+1: Must be pushing close to 5000lm ?
Nah. Not with XP-G3s. I have no idea though. That’s djozz’s domain.
It’ll surprise ya Ouchy, those G3’s do a surprising job. I’m betting it’s up around 3700-4000 at 16A, really decent light and a nice upgrade for the ol girl. Good job! 
I just purchase that light on Amazon with a similar mod in mind.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G22V9H8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Any chance of getting some beam shots?
Looks like 2 versions at Fasttech, try ’oogle
fasttech trustfire A8
mentions the BLF special edition in one of the results
[quote=CalebAny chance of getting some beam shots?[/quote]
The best I could do off my balcony with an iPad camera. It’s raining outside.
Control
High
Sorry. It doesn’t tell you much, but it really lights the place up.
I’ll try to do a comparison against my other stock BLF Edition A8 with the outdated emitter a driver. I might then mod the other one, keeping it as a single emitter light with stock reflector and upgraded LED and FET driver.
Thanks, Ouchyfoot.
How does the body handle the heat?
Just fine. I’ve got a pretty big mass of copper in there. I can run it for quite a while on high. In fact, I haven’t even had time to see how long it can go until I need to level down.
Good to see you’re using a hacksaw for that copper.
Making the chunky A8 even chunkier with lots of copper! Great job Ouchy!
I do not have a Trusfire A8 but do have a spare Ultrafire clone of it that has a threaded-in pill, have to use that for a project sometime with that Kathod optic!