Ultrafire WF-501b - driver failure

Yesterday, I finally got around to posting in the welcome section where I mentioned really liking my Ultrafire WF-501b with XR-E R2 emitter.

Well, as it would happen, last night I was walking around outside when I noticed the light blink a couple of times and then get dim very quickly. Dim like budget-keychain-light dim. I took the light inside and swapped with a charged cell which didn't help. I disassembled the light (difficult due to the tightly foil-wrapped dropin) and checked for obvious issues. Not finding any problems, I swapped in a spare 3x 7135 multi-mode driver I had on hand. After doing so, the light worked properly again! I'm not a big fan of multi-mode but at least my light's working now. I no longer have the option of using 2x CR123A cells though. No idea what killed the driver since it's been well heat-sinked and used much for much longer than last night with no issues... It hadn't even started to get warm yet.

Yeah, this is a newbie question, but to swap drivers requires soldering, yes?

I haven't messed with dis-assembling any drop-ins yet, just curious.

Yes, I had to unsolder the driver from the pill. (I used a solder-sucker which helped a lot in doing this.) You then have to de-solder the emitter leads from the old driver and resolder the leads onto the new driver. It's not difficult if you have steady hands and a bit of soldering experience... I also like using the soldering paste they have at DX. It makes soldering a lot simpler than using a standard flux-core solder.

Keltex (or others) is there an inexpensive soldering kit that has everything I'd need to do this?

I wouldn't know. I have a cheap soldering iron from Wal-Mart; sometimes, those come in a kit with a coil of solder that's not really well suited for delicate electronics work. I bought my solder and soldering paste from DealExtreme. Radio Shack might have something but they are usually too expensive for my tastes. And since none of the ones here in my area carry components any longer, I don't even bother with stopping there.