Has anyone modded a Streamlight Polytac? Is it a standard P60 type of body, of are things glued in place or otherwise difficult to mod?
The reason I ask is that you can get the light for about $26-28 bucks, and it is different but I like it. I think you can also get it in hi-visibility yellow.
Problem with plastic bodies is their lack of thermal conductivity - you wouldn't want to put anything producing much heat into such a body. You almost certainly would get bad results with more powerful LEDs. Incandescent bulbs don't mind the heat, driver circuits and LEDs do.
I'd be reluctant to drive a 3W LED like an XR-E hard in that body, let alone the 10 or so watts an XM-L consumes. An XM-L at 350mA or an XP-G at that sort of current might give good results, but not crazy lumens.
thanks Don. After browsing around the much-maligned CPF, it looks like the C4 (bottom photo in the OP) is probably an XR-E anyway, so may not need to mod it.
I like the idea of a more durable polymer body and the hi-visibility yellow. Maybe down the road a bit, to many recent Paypal expenditures...
It might be interesting to mod the LED, leaving the stock driver in place. With a large US company like Streamlight you can be pretty certain that they've done their homework on thermals, so a more efficient LED (As all the XP-G and XM-Ls are) ought to give less heat and more light at the same power draw. But the stock driver is designed as a 6V unit so might not work well with a single 4.2V cell. But it might. If I had one, I'd be quite tempted to put a newer LED in it to see what happened.
But it isn't a light for flat-out maximum output. It was never intended to be.
A pal of mine works as a life support technician on a saturation diving vessel and I've played with lights that can tolerate those pressures and being violently decompressed (Helium under saturation diving pressures gets everywhere. Purge valves are essential. This can be quite distressing for a saturation diver whose tooth fillings have any porosity at all - having your teeth explode when you are days of decompression from the nearest dentist is not remotely like fun!). Most of those lights look like sick glow-worms. In fact the safety yellow plastic they are made of is usually brighter than the light they emit :(
I'd want to check that before buying. I'd not be all that keen (Though it'd be a lot easier) to bore the body if necessary to take an 18mm cell. My guess would be that it probably wouldn't as then CR123s would wobble around inside. You'd probably get a 17670 into it though. Or a 4/3A NiMH though I doubt the driver could handle the lower voltage when it's a 6V light.
On the discription for the Streamlight it says "Features adjustable head that allows for variable spot-to-flood focus." which dosn't bode well for it being an easy switch to a P60 anyway.
I saw a p60 light on CPF that someone had coated with a bright orange hard wearing finish. Ooh I foudn the link more easily than I thought :)