What did you mod today?

Nice mod with the charger. :+1:

Those silly little volt meters fit inside very well. Got to get one of the 3 wire ones, then it will display voltage below 3 volts.

Nice. I did basically the same thing with my light saber, because taking the battery out is kind of a huge pain and risks damaging the internals. Also, it has no true “off” switch otherwise; I have to put in a non-conductive “kill key” to cut power.

B58U waterproof test

Sure thing! Just purchased two, I hope they prove good for modding and gifts. $2.5 is a steal for nice host.

A Ray Bow RB 501,
a budget two zone zoomy, with advanced TIR + aspheric optics, from Taobao.com https://world.tmall.com/item/15302013715.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.JDDdGF&skuId=57727356140, via an agent. The head slides on two o-rings, and it is generally very well built for an un-shipped price of around $5 with battery. See New or little known multi-zone (Fresnel) zoom optics.

This is just a driver and LED swap, but with a lot of details. Yesterday is the first time I built a Wight FET + 1 x 7135 driver. I have been getting them from BangGood and already built from Richard, because they looked hard to assemble. This one is with a board from OSH Park and a kit from Mtn. Elect. It looks a little crooked, but it works.
I also had to file a 16 mm. Noctigon down to 8 mm. The old star was put in place with rubbery thermal compound, so I used thermal epoxy. I didn’t file the pillar of the pill shorter, so I had to add an o-ring spacer to get it to focus, even though it had travel to spare before. The Noctigon added over a mm.

That is an XP-G R5 4C. I put heat sink compound on the pill threads and the front slide o-ring, as usual.

Added: The driver started having problems soon after I wrote this. It may be my build or the narrow ground ring. I plan to try a BangGood A6 driver in it. It worked really well when it worked and was, briefly, among my best lights.

August 20:
Because the narrow ground ring may have been the problem, I switched to a Qlite 11 x 7135 driver.
A problem remained that it went out, without changing modes, when the optics touched the dome of the LED. I added a 2nd o-ring spacer and partially de-domed the XP-G with file. It works now.
Next time: BangGood driver or Nichia LED, less solder between LED and star, file the pillar flat and 1 mm. or a bit more shorter. De-dome.
It seems to be not as bright as it was with the FET driver, but it works. The file de-dome seems to have made the spot smaller.

It seems not bright enough for the current it draws. Maybe the LED is damaged. I am changing to a Nichia LED that may work better and will draw more current. The pill is only about 1 mm. thick at the top, so I can’t file it to make up for the extra thickness of the direct thermal star.

I modded the Skilhunt H03F.
First I removed the Noctigon baseplate with a XM-L2 8B4 HICRI that was monuted on my H02.
Then I soldiered on the H03F and checked if it worked.
All good, exept that the Noctigon was too large to lay flat in the head of the H03F.
:rage:

So I removed the Noctigon from the H03F, I did re-flow a XM-L2 7C1 on the H03F original baseplate and reinstalled it.
Then, instead of putting the H03F toghether as original, I used the TIR optic from the H02, and I gave the H02 the reflector from the H03F.
Now I will use a lot more the H03 and I can still use the H02 (that now is a H02R).

I had one UF-1504 leftover that had a Nichia219C and LD2 driver, that never had good throw. I redid the mod today, and now it still has its high current forward clicky (‘6A Ebay-switch’ I prefer a reverse clicky but this 1504 first gen. switch design does not fit a standard switch-board), and a BLF-A6 driver and dedomed XP-G2 S3 3D. For what it is worth for a thrower, the tint is pretty nice, much better than the much used (and now unavailable) S4 2B, and the throw is also really good, I measure 486 kcd at a current of 4.1A on a Keeppower 26650 IMR 4200 mAh, 30 seconds after switch-on.

I think that the mods are well done, with a high amp switch, neat spring bypasses, ledboard soldered to pill, area around the led-die blackened, very clean beam in spot mode. The body does not look mint anymore though, decent enough, but the ano is not perfect on some edges anymore.

In the end I like the impressive throw but still find the light too heavy to take on trips.

Almost too easy to be called modding but…

A couple 2 or 3 weeks ago while checking out a comment about an S70 clone on ebay I saw a SRK in gold with 9 emitters on the cheap. Stupid cheap, like $13 or something. So I bought one. It came today… with Lattice Bright emitters making 1683 lumens on 4 LG HE-4 button top cells. Of course I opened it up and checked it out. They had a large FET for a simple driver, no sense resistor, small pair of wires to a single aluminum mcpcb housing the 9 XM-L copycats. So I pulled the LB emitters, dug around through my ever growing pile of stuff and found 9 XM-L’s I’ve pulled from other lights an put it back together with 20 ga Turnigy leads. 1811 lumens rock solid, meter wasn’t budging. Then I remembered having a second one of Richards SRK group buy driver’s put away… so I stuck that in there in place of the simple 2 mode (w hidden strobe) driver.

Now it makes 3881 lumens in High, 1228 lumens in medium and a very miserly 0.38 lumens in Moon. With reversing switch, it’s really nice. :slight_smile:

Perhaps later, if I remember, I can make a nice copper heat sink to assist the thick aluminum mcpcb….

Edit: 4157.25 lumens with the batteries freshly charged and an UCLp swapped in. Works for me! :slight_smile:

Edit: Pics of the driver and mcpcb from the e-bay Sky Ray with omitted “king”. (it’s a SRK but a clone apparently, although the site showed Sky Ray King lights)

Modded… or more like fixed my lumzoo GH10 with XP-L HI and a Zebralight driver rescued from a H600. The reason I didn’t repair the ZL instead was the press-fit bezel and would not longer be waterproof after the mod. Awesome compact angle light with excellent build quality all around.

From the BLF Q8 project, got in the V5.1 drivers and reflowed a couple up, bench tested running the latest Narsil v1.1. It now can blink out the firmware vers #, as well as having full access to all strobe modes from ramping:

Also modded up the new UltraFire U-F10, yes, it's a real, true authentic Ultra Fire here, least it says so on UltraFire.com. It's got the driver in the tailcap:

Here's a close up of the 1 sided driver:

And here's the contact board in the pill:

The mods I made were: XM-L2 on SinkPAD, reflowed to the brass pill top (thick shelf), wires upgraded to 22 AWG, spring bypass's, and a resistor mod: added a 0.5 ohm on top of one of the 1.5 ohm resistors (I traced to follow a FET), and got amps up from 0.85A to 1.25A - moderate bump up, but now it does over 500 lumens in flood.

I'm thinking the MCU runs on power via those 3 resistors (bleed resistors?) that sit between LED+ and LED-, but the what that hard white substance covers is a mystery, but it's very low profile.

Anyone have ideas on how this tail driver e-switch works? No separate wires between the pill and tail.

Had a chance to put some XP-G3’s in a few different hosts, one being a Manker U11. Removed the original board and re-flowed a “3” series High-CRI XP-G3 in place of the original XP-L. Definitely exhibits the hotspot-corona K/temp variation others have noted. The tint is the “creamiest” 5K emitter I’ve seen, more yellow than the Nichia’s I’m used to. Could be exaggerated because of the reflector, (others have said they look better in an optic), or could be further off the BBL line than the Nichia’s, hard to say because the specific tint bins weren’t listed.

Can’t speak to specific comparative output because I can’t get to most of my equipment, but to the eye it doesn’t look like I lost much output, but the throw was improved.

Hopefully I can get into storage and locate some of my stuff, first mods I’ve done in a while and it stinks having now way to measure output. There’s also a box of old lights in there somewhere, there’s a particular one I want mod with one of the XP-G3s, it’s a older E2L Outdoorsman, the one with the factory optic. Originally came with a Lux-III, so it might actually work well.

I’ll try and get some pics up later, can compare between the XP-G3 High-CRI and an NVSW High-CRI, but forgot to take “before” beamshots of the original XP-L.

-Michael

I tried a new production style XPG2 S4 2B in my UF-1504. With a fresh Liitokala 26650, I got 463kcd at 30sec. I only have one new style XPG2, bought from MTN, but this one performs quite well.

Not quite as good as the old one which was ~520kcd.

I think those colors showing in the image of the emitter are literally chunks of different phosphors — coarsely ground up, mixed in some medium and extruded to make the spot on the die. The coarser the phosphor material is, the spottier the die looks and the less consistent the color will be from one LED to the next on the same reel.

There’s an analogy with prescription medicines I recall reading a warning about:

— some pills are thoroughly mixed finely ground active ingredient(s) and binder, and it’s safe to break them (and they’re often scored to make it easy to divide them). When you break that kind of pill in half you get about the same amount of active ingredient in each half.

— some pills are coarse chunks of active ingredient(s) in a binder, and aren’t safe to divide — when you break them you can get all the active ingredient in one half, and just the binder in the other half.

I recall seeing that kind of spotty color mixing in LEDs used in one of the variations of the ZeusRay, when they were cutting corners on those. I’d suspect the reels are from a batch of poorly mixed phosphor.

(from Amount of active ingredient evenly distributed throughout each pill? | Drugs-Forum)

A Maxtoch and Convoy fusion.

Dedomed XML2 U4 and LD-2 driver.
360.000 Cd.

i mode old torch to a new modern led torch with a cree led that can recharge easily and can be used for long time!!
it most fun and useful?

I copied this Ultrafire F13 mod :

The driver is Hi(1000mA) > Lo(200mA) > Str, with ontime memory and cool white LED.

Normally I don’t like cool white LEDs and ontime memory but this flashlight puts a smile on my face.

It’s a nice little mod a $10 host plus driver ($8,53) and LED ($5,99).

I like the driver/LED combination so much I have ordered a Jaxman X1 host from this thread :

This mod is on my list too. Did you measure throw and/or lumens?

No I don’t have any way to measure LUX/Lumens

There is An MT-G2 mod on my list with two 26350 but I don’t know which host should I put in. F13 or Convoy L2. Luckily I need to build one for a friend with F13 host and he sent me a ZY-T08 MT-G2 for some repair and I can decide which one I want to build for myself.