…continues to astonish me. We’ve had input on it before in this thread…
…and make no mistake, this cheapie UltraOK light is worth every bit of what it’ll cost in that sub-$20 category, especially for actual usable lights with amazing throw!
As of now, it just passed its 1-hour mark on the runtime test with seemingly the same brightness with which it began, running one Ortronic 3100 (these batteries are awesome, btw!) at 608 lumens.
Update: Now nearing 1 hour and 30 minutes. Very little heat, just slight warmness to the body, barely noticeable. It’s less driven than the way we normally like our XM-Ls, but it will perform pretty much the same on 4 AAAs, which makes it a great gift for non-flashaholics. And remember what we said about lights being fit for using as opposed to just high-powered toys. This is a great tool—bright enough to impress, but cheap enough to actually use without worry of breaking or losing.
I hate the PWM on low and the lack of an anti-roll feature, but you can’t go wrong for the price. This is a recommended budget buy from Rusty’s collection for sure!
After 1 and 40 minutes on high…
The green isn’t there in real life, but you can see some rings, which - if you think about it - only give character to a light!
The runtime test lasted till 6:17 when the light finally fell out of high mode and into medium, but still had a usable beam’s brightness. That’s over 2 and half hours on high. And the cell I was using wasn’t even a fully topped off cell. I’d used it for several 10 or 15 minute intervals. I am amazed!
Rusty, did you beef up heatsinking at all? At least spread thermal grease to the outer rim of the pill? So many people seem afraid to burn these emitters in these lights up. So far I've only added thermal grease to the edge of the pill/star contact area.
Also, what's your tailcap current on that Orbtronic cell (fully charged of course)?
-Garry
P.S. I too very much like this light, but only run it on 4AAA's due to lack of heatsinking (until I get around to that).
No, nothing at all. At just barely 2 amps, it doesn’t generate much heat. I tried 4AAAs and didn’t notice but smidgen difference in performance, if that. Full runtime until I got tired of the test and just shut the light off was at 7:30 pm, which was approaching 4 hours. Wowy.
I love this light, but due to its versatility, its in the glovebox with an imr loaded and the 4xaaa loaded with rechargables, since its sat in a landcruiser, this is probably a waste of the light, breaking down is something that happens to other vehicles, but the fact that it’ll take easily available cells means that’s the most sensible place for it, I just check the cells every week to be sure everything is tip top.
I couldn’t break 3A until I replaced the wiring between the driver in the star. Reading around 3.4A now, but I’m convinced that the tail switch brings that back under 3A again. A lot of resistance there. Still trying to figure a way to get a better switch in there.
My goal is to get this thing to out throw my UF 980L (while retaining the XM-L), which it doesn’t yet.
For some reason after i put in the new heatsink in mine something seems flakey. The driver doesnt snug up real good anymore. Wish it was a standard sized driver! Still like it but sometimes have to bump it to make it brighter.
Did you notice that the driver sits on a screw-in aluminium ring? I removed mine, scuffed it up a bit with some sand paper, applied some flux, and managed to get a couple of blobs of solder to stick after much fussing about, which I then flowed across to the driver. Make sure you screw that ring back in really tight too.
