The Good News: At 4 pm today, I de-domed my first light! It was my UF V3! Lux went from maybe 20,000ish to about 45,000ish. This thing is a whole-nuther light! The beam is as tight as an aspheric.
The Bad News: I couldn’t be content and peeled off and layer after layer until I hit the phosphor and now the beam is dark blue!
As everyone has said, de-doming is easy and works. I just took an exacto knife and slowly cut off the top as though slicing through cold cheese. When I turned it on, the tint was warmer and about 30% less bright. Then I took off two more layers hoping to remove the horrible ringiness and uneven patches of dark. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone!
Now, the phosphor is more than half of fully exposed and the center beam is as blue as a magic marker. Pics are useless since the camera always renders a bright ball, leading me to believe the brightness did not drop as much as I at first imagined (maybe 500ish lumens now), but it’s as blue as a 13-year-old goth girl’s psychotic drawings with a pen just after a breakup with her chubby, pimply-faced love of 14! lol Yeah, that blue!
At first, I couldn’t believe I did that to such an awesome light. I felt like I’d gone a great wrong. And then I realized I am being ridiculous. It is time to repeat the procedure with much greater care on a new sacrifice-able host. On the plus side, maybe I have a light that can pick up bodily fluids?
Yep, I know the feeling. I have screwed up probably about $200 in flashlights all because of this de-doming thread. I haven’t seen nowhere near the results that others have claimed in throw either on the ones I had done and were still working. I just don’t see it’s advantages. And the drawbacks aren’t worth it. I got one light that still works that is blue like the one you showed. Totally annoying. I like my XM-L beams just the way they are from now on.
The FandyFire STL-V6 is now gone as well. But even when I had it working the Crelant 7G5 still beat it pretty easily. So that just shows to me that de-doming don’t double your lux.
I considered that maybe this was another P7-ish “900 lumens” craze phase, but truthfully, it did increase lux by about %35 percent or more, I’d say. The beam is just useless now.
EDIT: Then again, you could argue most of that lux increase is offset by the decrease in brightness! lol
You must have peeled off the Phosphor layer to turn it blue like that. With the phosphor layer intact and dome removed the color shifts to yellow in a major way. (using heat seems to be the best way to totally remove the dome while leaving the phosphor intact) I’ve de-domed 2 XM-L’s, both successful. I’m done de-doming as well. I think for better throw just use a different/bigger reflector or XP-G2.
If you completely peel the gel off leaving the bare phosphor you can get a 75%+ increase in lux, because there is no gel left to internally reflect the light away from the reflector. By keep a layer of gel on, you cut the output by a lot but if completely take everything off the output decrease is significantly less.
Well I haven’t been able to peel the silicone off without leaving some remains. The one that I did peel off with no remains peeled the phosphor layer off. I’m done de-doming and wasting my hard earned money. I prefer the XM-L the way they are. If dedoming was so much better in throwing, then why do they ship the LED’s with the dome on them?
