What did you mod today?

Damned burrito’s. Yeh I might try your idea another day, thanks. Time for bed.

It’s always something…

How do I sputter the reflector? Never heard of that term being used in that context.

Otherwise thanx for the advice. I will look into it.

Sputtering in this context is fogging the surface with sparse droplets of a clear finish that doesn’t yellow much, it breaks up beam artifacts. There ought to be some posts here on it, I know OL has done some. As opposed to sputtering in outrage though the pictures brought to mind might be similar.

Or stippling as OldLumens calls it

sk68 clone.
Part of host threads are cutted off, sliding tube is fixed in lowest position.
Custom copper pill, XP-E2 triple with Carclo lens under 20mm glass.

P.S. I have lots of this hosts and pills but no time at all so I can send them to anyone who will pay shipping cost.

Light and pill free if shipping is paid? Is that what you are saying?

Yes, sipik AA clone host without stock pill with copper one. Parts may look not good and sometimed requires lots of hand work time (which I dont have).
Need to check how many they I have. I suppose 15-20 sets.

1 Thank

And yes, I need to say this one more time:
XP-E2 is defenetly best emitter for 10mm tir optics.

Would love one set if shipping is reasonable, i would love to try and assemble one if it is possible only by hand work, don’t have any power tools for the job.

Main work is:

  1. Chech how does pill enters tube (mid part). It should be pressed inside, if it can not be pressed sand pill OD.
  2. When pill is pressed and you are screwing this set into host measure how much distance between tube end and host. Then you need to cut this distance from part of host with internal thread

Pill is press fitted into the tube that is used for the focus and then screwed into the host, then measure for clearance for the optics and led star and then cut the required size off the host? It does not seem that hard, but i cant find any 14500 battery around, had few dunno where they went, might be thrown away, so im out, sorry for taking ur time :slight_smile:

Would using DC fix work also (I don’t know… I’m just asking)? Also, there was someone here who bought a quantity of DC fix and was selling smaller pieces, but I don’t recall who that was…

I modded a 'On the Road' i3 today. It is a little 16340 zoomie with glass lens. It was a deal on Gearbest, but still over 20 dollars (coupon still works I believe, see their thread). But I must say it is a pleasure to see a small zoomie for once that is well build: good materials, brass pill, quality glass lens, accessable and servicable clicky, nice wide flood, good output. Only downside: the very cool tinted XP-G2. It is small, even for a 16340 light, but of course you never beat the Olight S1, here it is compared to a few of the smallest 16340 lights:

Here's what you get and what's inside the light, the 'on the road' battery actually measured 700mAh:

That is a nice padded pouch, but I'm not going to use it for this light. The driver is a typical generic chinese flashlight driver, this type has a nice high frequency invisible PWM btw. The o-ring that is seen before the battery tube is what the lens sits on, it looks broken but it actually is meant this way, not going fully round to allow air to pass when the head is zoomed in and out. Of course this implies that the head is not completely waterproof. The aluminium disk screws down the ledboard and functions as a sort of diffuse reflector for a bit of extra spill light. The switch board can be accessed from the outside by screwing out a disk from around the boot cap.

I modded the light with a 4000K 90+CRI XP-G3 and a BLF-A6 driver. Initially I went for a Banggood X5/X6 Bistro driver but I did not get the UI to work properly: did not manage to disable the annoying initial bad set temperature control.

The led was soldered on a 16mm Noctigon that was soldered onto the brass pill. The stock light focusses beyond the sharp die image when in spot position, so the extra thickness of the Noctigon brought the die exactly in focus.

The 15mm stock driver is contained in a thin brass ring, without the ring the pill can accomodate a 16mm driver. The BLF-A6 driver could be easily sanded down to 16mm without cutting vital traces/via's or other problems.

I do not like the 'reflector' so I made it black with heater paint, I also blackened the red Noctigon around the led with a marker. Better!

When the light was finished it was clear that you do not want this led die in focus, it looks like this, but in reality even uglier:

So I removed the pill again and put a thin copper ring behind the rim of the pill, so that the slider stops early and the light focusses short of the sharp die image. I lost some throw but the beam is much much better! I'm sorry, I did not make pictures of how the copper ring is sitting.

Finished:

Output on highest setting with the head in flood position: 760 lumen after 3 seconds, 680 lumen after 30 seconds. The flood is wide and very even in tint and intensity, just some yellow on the very edge, the spot setting has about 10 times the throw of the flood setting (estimated, not measured). This is not a champion thrower but has a very usefull flood and a very useful spot. A high CRI pocket rocket, this will be my EDC the coming period :-)

Now for something quite weird: I made a reflector light with this same type of led yesterday, in fact they were next to each other in the same piece of reel. The beam of that S8 light has artifacts, the tint was quite yellow in the spill and blueish in the hotspot, nice enough but not great. Now this zoomie on the other hand has a beautiful tint, almost as rosy as the original high CRI Nichia 219A. totally different, very hard to believe it is the same type of led. I made a beam picture of the two lights next to each other, for once the tints in the picture are quite realistically what I saw, left the above zoomie, right the S8 reflector light:

Can you believe that? If you look directly at the leds next to each other on moon setting, I see a difference but it is not that obvious at all.

So is this the optics doing this? (in other words: is the reflector screwing it all up?). Or is there a huge tint variation within the leds in the same reel?

In any case: XP-G3 + aspheric lens : great even flood, but make sure the die is off-focus in spot-position

Forgot to mention: the stock ‘on the road’ i3 has a clear and annoying wide ring in the beam. This ring can be reduced to hardly noticable if you blacken the edge of the glass lens with a black permanent marker.

That tint variation is scary. I hope it’s a freak anomaly.
It reminds me of the variation I got between an Olson square and SSL of the same temperature and CRI.

I killed the driver on my stock Convoy S2+ fooling around with a DMM's lead's, so I replaced it with a Convoy LD25 and swapped the emitter with a XP-G2 S2 0D Noctigon I had in reserve-

Beamshot definitely leans towards the blue side

DC fix, sputtering, or an OP reflector will all minimize it. Some optics will also work well if they have a small amount of diffusion built in.

Got a Package yesterday from RMM.
Bunch O Shtuff.

Threw together an S2+ grey with FET + 7135 ( MTN17DDm-NUV) guppy dual and spring bypass and XML2 U4 1C.
Light was done before my 1st Coffee this mornin.

2 more S2+ hosts here and some FET triple parts for XPL HI and 219C. But no copper pill to get those done.

Very nice mod, but only 10 nights per charge?

I’ve been using my oldest CNQG brass 18650 light for a night light lately, still with its original XP-G emitter and nanjg driver. But I gave it new firmware. The new “good night” mode blinks out voltage then goes to a ~10 lumen mode and slowly decreases for about an hour until it shuts off and goes into sleep mode. I shut it completely off after waking in the morning. It looks like it’ll last about a year per charge. Would something like that work for you?

I’m not concerned about waking up in the dark though; I mostly just wanted some dim ambient light at bed time so my partner and I can see each other before falling asleep. It’s a bit unfortunate when a goodnight kiss lands on a nose or eye or something. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Before that, I was using a ZL SC52 on its brightest moon mode. It gets about 2 months per charge. Not as bright, but still bright enough to see reasonably well (IMO, but I’m super photosensitive).

I guess I’m just a little surprised at the low lumens-per-watt of the amber emitter. It sounds like it’s getting around 25 lm/W?