Sorry no pics or anything just a quick description of the built.
I call it my six penny mod because I used 6 old copper pennies for making the pill. I had some 16mm aluminum stars laying around as well. I started with them. I sanded them down and epoxied them into the brass pill. This left me with room for wires. On top of that I epoxied in place the six pennies, sanded and lapped together for a copper pill. On top of that went a 3x 219 nichia star and optics from Kaidomain. The star was in parallel.
For a driver I used one of the ones with a hidden strobe. I can’t remember exactly which one. 100% 50% 5% maybe. Mode memory also. I rewired it with heavy gauge wire and added a longer spring.
For extra heatsinking and contact with the body of the light I tried to use a slice of copper, but it just wouldn’t make good contact with the body. I actually melted the solder on one of the wires leaving it sit on high. So I pulled it back apart and did the good old tinfoil trick and that worked much better. The body now gets hot fairly soon. It’s radiating through the entire head. I’m getting just over 500 lumens on startup and I had over 400 lumens after going outside and walking around for quite a while. So it does pretty good now. It got hot but not blistering hot even after being left on high the whole time.
500 lumens doesn’t sound like much, but the beam and color is absolutely beautiful. It’s as close to perfect as it gets. It’s really floody with a large hotspot that blends in perfectly. I now really see the attraction of these type of optics.
Also these 502b lights are really nice, the clip is good the body on them is super. There is really no comparison to the 501b.
This mod was a fair amount of work, but I would say it’s worth it to get such a nice light for the price. If you were just looking at the beam alone you would swear it was a very high end light, the UI is very nice and the light itself doesn’t feel or look cheap. It’s actually comparable to a solarforce or at least not far behind at all.
“500 lumens doesn’t sound like much, but the beam and color is absolutely beautiful. It’s as close to perfect as it gets. It’s really floody with a large hotspot that blends in perfectly”
Sounds like a dream light to me. Would love to see some pics of the beam. Use of copper pennies is very creative. Use what you have handy to make it work. Perfect!
That’s the one right there. Nice little star it just need a lot of heatsinking to do it’s job right. The optic also needs to be sanded down a bit to actually allow that to happen. the little plastic posts that stick through the star go too far, they should be shorter so the emitters can actually set right in the lens. That way you can set that star flat on something and get some thermal transfer going.
I’m 99% sure that this is the driver 2,800ma it’s an 8 chip anyway.
If I get a chance I’ll try and post some tonight. It’s not the greatest time of the year for outside shots. It’s a dirty spring right now. This light will just be fantastic once the grass and trees are green again. It’s nice inside too though. It’s the most natural light that I have and I have tons of lights. It’s like bringing a nice afternoon or early evening light inside with you.
It’s all flood, it’s like having a mini flooder with super tint. There is a hot spot but it’s very big and almost unnoticeable unless you are shining it on a wall.
The tinfoil works better on this but normally I use a slice of 3/4 inch copper tubing. Cut off about 1 inch of it and then take a hacksaw to it and open it up. It’s just enough to fit around the reflector and jams in pretty tight with the body. I have even done copper wire wraps but it doesn’t work much better than tinfoil.
I’m really digging this light though. I have a whole bunch of 502’s to play with. I bought twenty of them. The came with a junk battery and cheap charger. What’s funny is that I modded the driver on a couple of them and they did pretty good but you still have the damn blinkies. I did a complete mod on one. I de-domed the emitter and put it on a sinkpad. heavy wires and spring mods too. I’m getting 800 lumens with that light with the good Sanyo batteries like I sent you. With the cheap ultafire batteries it gets only 400 lumens. It’s that big of a difference.
I did a similar thing but used a Convoy S2, I like your idea of stacked copper coins for the pill spacer. I tried a few solutions but settled on concentric copper and split copper pipes press fitted in. I went direct drive and it works fine with no adverse effects.
These triple Nicha’s are really the dogs nads, and make really good lights, they are great for headlamps. One thing though, in between the various r&d sessions the star was left in a ziplock with the optic, well it managed (one emitter) to dedome itself!!!
Has become one of my favorites even though I have not finished it yet. Have to file circular cutouts in the ‘bezel’ so it does not restrict the optics. Mind you have left it like this for a fair while now balking at having to disassemble it to finish it.
Hope you can see the dedomed one in this pic. To my eyes not a huge difference in tint overall but hard to say as the other two overpower it. Against another triple again not huge difference.
Bought a S5 as another host for the triple but might go with a 502b as well. I have seen someone use 4 of these in a srk (on a Russian forum I think IICR or might have been the German one) and having now used these triples and seen what they can do, that mod to a srk is definitely on the to do list.
No problem, I was also passing it on. I can’t remember who, but someone posted it. I think it was in the deals section. It is a good deal that’s for sure.
