YUPARD 9 x XM-L
When I started this mod, my heart wasn't really in it. Ive been playing with KD beast drivers, and planned to put one in this this light. By the time I got to this mod, I'd realized that they only have a life span of twenty minutes, so I was kind of down.
Then I thought about the FET drivers I got from RMM. I'd never tried them, and can't say I really understood them. My mind was on one type of modding, and I'm not smart enough to learn about two things at the same time.
I wasn't sure if it would be worth my bother to try it with a 3P3S setup with nine emitters, so I talked to Richard. He assured me it would work, but I'd need to do a Zener mod. That part I still don't understand, but he assured me it was necessary. Since I'm new to all this, I just performed the Zener mod on the FET driver with blind faith.
I've been doing a lot of multi emitter lights lately, and it gets expensive swapping in XM-L2s, so I kept the original XMLs. I did reflow them onto Sinkpads though.
I did the wiring with 26AWG 9 strand silver teflon wire. I really like this stuff for multi emitter lights because of its very low profile. The bottom of this reflector is flat, so low profile is nessesary.
I stripped the stock driver for a contact board. I couldn't be bothered fiddling around with the traces, so I just drilled a hole through the middle that was the same size as the small spring on the FET driver.
Copper braid was added to the driver first and threaded through the hole. The small spring was pushed through the contact board until it was flush, then solders into place.
I kept threading the braid through the battery spring, soldered everything down, and added ground wires to the driver.
The parallel leads were bundled together and soldered to the LED +\- pads. Each set of leads runs three XMLs in series.
Notice the bit of black shrink tubing on the - set of leads. I only had one color wire, and didn't want to get confused.
In the end, this light was interesting to put together.
This is the part where I'm going to need some help. With the emitters wired 3P3S and a Zener diode in the mix, I have no idea how to calculate how much current per emitter I'm getting with 3 x 26650 in series.
I also had no idea this driver had five modes until I turned it on.
Tail readings with 3 x KingKong 26650
100% - 10.09A
- 4.36A
- 1.78A
- 0.34A
- 0.10A
I didn't know what to expect when I first turned it on. But it's real bright and I'm real happy. Plus I won't have to pull out a dead KD driver after twenty minutes.
It was a long day, so I haven't had time to braid the tailspring, and the reflector is sitting up on a couple of the centering discs. I'll fiddle with that stuff tomorrow.
And to top off the bottom, my signature clear bootcap.
Happy Modding.