UltraFire A1 - 16340 firecracker! (beamshots added)

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

UltraFire A1 is a cheap little CR123/16340 toy light with an awful XR-E and a surprisingly not-awful 5-mode driver (surely low output, but it has NO MEMORY, which means you don't have to get the blinkies unless you go looking for them).

It tailstands. Small miracles, right?

Couldn't possibly be any good, right? And something this far down the price scale must have very little potential to be transformed into something cool. Right? Right??!

Cheap flimsy awful little aluminum pill, oh well... wait, what? Does that fit?!

The reflector needs a relief cut on the base to clear the solder pads on a non-XRE board, pretty standard here, as this is the same reflector used in a lot of small tube lights.

So, a $10 light, that tailstands with no mods, has a nice sturdy snag-free pocket clip, can use a CR123 and live in the glovebox of your car for 10 years and still work when you need it, be a hot-rod with a 16340, and take any driver/LED combo you can fit in a P60 pill... why aren't you ordering one right now? Or two... or...

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A1 is using a different pill than shown in the build, it's a XML2 T6 '1C' (6500K)/Sinkpad/3.04A Nlite

MCU-C7s was built using the original pill (P60 won't fit this one), XPG2 R5 '3D' (5000K)/Sinkpad/2.8A Nlite

P60 to give something relatively common to compare with, is XML2 T6 '3C' (5000K)/Sinkpad/direct drive

I'll start a new thread on the MCU-C7s soon, but it's mostly just a straightforward 'install desired parts, insert battery, use flashlight' kind of project. The only tricky bit is mounting a 17mm driver onto a brass ring meant for a 15mm driver.

2

Doesn’t aluminum have a better thermal transfer than brass?

3

The light heats up just fine with the inferior brass pill, so the heat transfer is working. If the aluminum pill were beefy, and I had a box full of them already built up and they were available for cheap and sold individually, sure I'd use an AL pill. But this thing can about be folded in half with your bare fingers.

4

5

Nice!
I like these types of mods!
Thanks for sharing!

6

Up next, this one will not be quite so easy...

Doesn't tailstand. One-off pill. 15mm driver ring. No pocket clip.

7

I was about to troll you into a thermal-management argument until I read that part.

This is the same “form factor” as the Trustfire F20/Akoray K106 family, which some of us Really Really Like. 0:) Okay, they’re difficult-if-not-impossible to waterproof and the switches are crap, and they need a better LED and no-blinky driver… But I digress…

I looked far and wide for a “DIY” pill for one!! (F20/K106=Too small for a P60, BTW) The only hope I have is to turn and thread and bore and drill one for myself! Or rip the guts out of the pill that came with it! The things we do for a cheap common battery!

But the CR123’s prices are still coming down, and there’s the whole shelf-life/emergency-light oeuvre…

I have a couple of requests, if you don’t mind: Can you continue your most-beautiful dissection into the switch of your light? Those in the F20’s are really weak, pitiful, and desperately hard to get out. I (for one) would love to know how this one is made.

Also, could you take a little more time to show how to relieve the extra “meat” on the underside of the reflector? The two you show don’t even look similar, other than OD. Since you seem to be of the “Mass Is Best For Thermal Management” camp, I would have thought you’d wanted to leave more Al… A threaded, head-filling, solder-bump-relieved reflector would be Very Interesting …

The points you made about battery shelf life, plus the discovery of P60 pills fitting, all make this much more interesting, even to some of us who like it a lot already!

Thank you for this brilliant post!

Dim

8

Yes, the switch/tailcap is kinda gimmicky. It has a black plastic ring pressed into the tailcap, which squishes the switch tabs against the spring's baseplate and the I.D. of the un-anodized threads. It requires some fiddling. Originally one of the switch legs was just bent underneath, then the spring plate sat on top of the folded-under leg. I reshaped that leg so it would fit between the plate and the lower coil of the spring (to do that the spring plate needed a little notch cut in the outer edge to allow the switch to sit on-center). The black plastic retainer also got a similar clearance notch for the other leg of the switch. Before doing all that, the switch sat cocked off to one side, and the spring plate cocked off to the other side... just a shoddy mess, really. Thank Buddha the switch boot was already short enough that it didn't require shimming to enable tailstanding.

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oops... forgot about the reflector. Yeah, those two reflectors started out identical. I scribed a mark for the part of the base that would be left in place to seat on the LED insulator, then did a shallow cut with a square-faced Dremel bit up to that scribe line, then took off the rest with a hand file. I took off way more than is needed just to clear the wires.

I'm not a member of the 'mass fixes thermal issues' camp, but this aluminum pill is just too thin. It may have more threads, but if the metal is too thin to pass enough heat fast enough to where it can be transferred to the outer shell... I considered cutting out the center of the stock pill and pressing in a 1/8" thick copper disc, but that's a lot of work and a lot of steps where it could go wrong, and the p60 pill being a direct fit was a no-brainer at that point.

I'd use a different driver if primarily using CR123s, or at least disable the low voltage detection on the 105C. The stock driver really isn't bad, no memory and it always starts on high mode. I haven't wired it up to check current output yet, but it is a non-boost driver, yet it still gave pretty good output with a CR123 before I tore the light to pieces. (the 15mm driver in the MCU-whatever-random-letters light is a boost driver and runs surprisingly well off even one AA NiMh, BUT, is is only high-low-strobe with next mode memory (a.k.a. 'anti-memory'))

:)

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comfy,
May we get post-op reflector measurements? I want to poke around for off-the-shelf solutions. An otherwise-humdrum toy becomes something more since you can take P60s and swap ’em at will.

11

Overall reflector dimensions didn't change, just the lower corner was cut off. There's several alternatives in this 18mm x 12mm size, and height can be more than 12mm easily, there's tons of threads in the head and the pill can move back a long ways before it hits the face of the battery tube and interferes with the head screwing down flush.

http://www.fasttech.com/products/1617/10001275/1209600-aluminum-orange-peel-reflector-for-cree-xp-g-emitt

http://www.fasttech.com/products/1617/10001275/1203502-aluminum-smooth-reflector-for-cree-xp-g-xp-e

12

That’s a great looking light. I recently put together a 602C but it lacks the clip and doesn’t tailstand. I’m definately gonna have to add the A1 to my collection. Is there a driver and led combination you would consider ideal for this light?

13

Now I have to toss one of these in with my next FT order.

14

An ideal combo? That's an awfully big can of worms right there...

I don't have any reservations with using a 2.8A driver and a XML2 in something this small (after all, that's what is in this light), but if you were going to go more for use with CR123 I'd probably use a 1-1.2A boost driver that could also tolerate 4.2v from a 16340. And it also depends on if you use it for long stretches, or in short bursts.

For the little black MCU-randomcharacters light I'm using a 2.8A driver and a 3D/5000K-tint XPG2.

15

Very cool mod.

I bought a 10B with the $5 DX coupon that they had a few weeks ago. I remembered that someone on here said they loved it had bought a bunch of them so I gave it a try. Well I couldn’t stand the beam it was incredibly ringy. I’m talking rings inside rings inside rings. But three modes, decent power with a 16340, tailstands. I had an extra T6 that I had de-domed a while back and I tossed that in. No rings now and a great tint plus it’s brighter too. It’s a great little light now. The Q5 emitter will get used on my next hillbilly lantern. Hands down the most simple mod I have done. It took longer for the soldering iron to warm up than it did to change the emitter.

These little lights are pretty cool to mod.

http://dx.com/p/new-10b-cree-q5-3-mode-310lm-white-led-flashlight-w-strap-black-1-x-cr123-or-1-x-16340-123406

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I will be using 16340 in this light so it looks like I’ll be ordering a XML2 and 2.8A driver with my A1 :slight_smile: Thanks

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Yeah I'm building up quite a collection of discarded awful XR-Es too.

One thing to note, on this A1 it needs a really thick spacer/centering ring and I don't know why (stack two XML insulators, with the one on the bottom shaved down to get rid of the raised center, and glue/epoxy them together). The reflector is the same part used in the TR-801 and I have one of those too and with both XML & XPG that one didn't need any oddball spacer thickness to get a tight spot.

18

Thanks for the tip. I wonder what you can do with an “awful XR-E”.

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You can do what I do. Make lanterns out of them. You tint the glass so color isn’t a factor and they are plenty bright if you use a few of them. If you use an 18650 battery box with a switch you can run them direct drive and you don’t need a driver or another switch. Cheap easy and fun. three of them run in series with a 4x18650 parallel box isn’t super bright but it will run for days on end and is more than enough light for a tent or a picnic table or to light up a room if the power goes off. I let one run for over 24 hours straight and then checked the batteries and it hardly made a dent. I also made one crazy bright with a bunch of emitters and a driver so it has modes. Fun stuff.

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That sounds cool. When I collect a few XRE’s I’ll five that a try.