Jexree Mini mod V6 with XP-L V6 3D on DTP with 18awg wires & the bare MTN12DD board with *detailed* mod info

*Version 6 & preliminary version 7 in post #61 #62

Version 5 is in post #59

Massive picture update in post #54

I bought a Jexree Mini and i cut a Noctigon XP-L V6 3D from Hank to fit on the 12,4mm wide shelf and used the stock leads and driver, the o ring & the plastic led protector wouldn’t fit with the higher star. EDIT yes it does i was wrong but it is really tight fit, but that helps hold down the mcpcb for better heatsinking :).

And this is CRAZY bright, at least up there with my BLF x6 and Zeusray, that means somewhere at least around 780-1000 lumens :slight_smile: probably even more the first seconds, i just can’t stop smiling when i use it, and i keep running down my efest 10440, i have to buy some more :slight_smile: 2 isn’t enough anymore or maybe build me some more usb charger boards for 0,150A 10440 charging.

Of course the beam is very floody with no real sharp hotspot like the x6 but for a in house edc light, that is perfect for me. it is now like the big 18650 lights in that when i light it up in a dark room i really feel that my eye’s pupils contracting, unlike the normal small lights thats not lighting up the whole room by itself and only throws a beam of light in to the darkness.

It is almost hard to believe how bright this is, i keep comparing it to the big lights because it is almost like my mind can’t accept the memory of that it REALLY are this bright.

The original xp-e i think that was in there before had some ugly rings in the beampattern, but this xp-l looks much nicer, i think it is partially because i defocused it a bit by dropping the reflector down over the led so it stick up in it now, i even failed to perfectly center it on my first try and that doesn’t show at all, i will have to fix that next time i take it apart, but for now i am just going to run down some more 10440 in it and smiling :bigsmile:

The V6 3D tint is very pleasant and neutral white with a hint of warm.
With the original boost driver it still works with NiMH with some modes and on the 10440 it goes direct drive.

It doesn’t stay that bright for as long as i want, because i need to improve the heatsinking, by sanding down the anodising on the shelf and improve the fit on the noctigon, but for a quick led upgrade this is crazy fun.

Next i am going to fix the slightly of centered led, improve the heatsinking & a low resistance mod on the bottom spring, then it is time for getting all the parts needed for wights 12-13mm FET with 7135 driver, so this will have some nice modes and some low volt protection built in to the driver, that will be very useful because the DD XP-L V6 3D eats 10440 like candy :slight_smile:

Congrats. Sounds like a great indoor/close proximity light. Gotta give us a beam shot some time.

Did you stick with the stock driver?

Thanks,

Yes the stock boost driver for now, hopefully i will assemble all the tools, parts, components & skill to build my own 12mm wight driver for total control & some nice long battery times in the near future, but for now this is very nice.

If had to do it again, and i will :slight_smile: i will probably try to get some sinkpads 2 10mm with the xp-l reflown to it, for an easier fit and build, but the 10mm sinkpads are sold out from the usual places like LEDDNA & vesture_of_blood on ebay.

Yesterday i remembered that i just got some QTC, so i stuck the tiny little square on the - on the battery and screwed gently on the bottom part………and it WORKS, success :smiley: instant seamless adjustable levels, it is like they made this light for it, i mean why else have a detachable bottom spring part on a tiny twisty light……that make no sens by itself but now :bigsmile:

It worked so well, somehow it kind of restored the modes of the driver on the 10440 when it is in lower output, it is a little tricky to get the hang of it, but now it can go instant max and the lowest moon mode i have ever seen and everything in between……:slight_smile:

I thought i would have to build one of wight driver to get this level of control.

Now i can control the level by either the top twisty action or the bottom fine tune screw + if it press the bottom……instant max like a momentary switch :bigsmile:

So cheap & easy and so much fun

And then it was DEAD…….:frowning: :~ :_( i guess the boost driver didn’t like the power source altering its characteristics so fast, so it broke something.

But like i always say, if you are going to push the envelope failure is always an option :wink:

So today after a good nights sleep, i opened it up again to try to figure out if the led was broken, it wasn’t :bigsmile: :party: so i stripped off all the components of the stock driver, and searched with my DMM for + & - on the top side of the driver board and found the + bat on the left pad where the coil was and - bat on the left C3 pad, so i soldered the red & black stock wire to them.

I cut of a little more of the noctigon xp16 to fit even better for more heatsinking and more room for the wires and tried to center it in the reflector this time.
It is a lot of things you have to think about that you don’t know you have think about before you do it……… :slight_smile:

And it all worked perfectly :bigsmile: Now it is direct driven from the 10440 with levels provided by the QTC and now it gets hotter than before so i guess the contact on the shelf is much better, i still need to sand of the anodizing, but this is much improved and this time i got it perfectly centered also.

Next step is trying to lower the resistance in the circuit by getting some fatter wires and instead of reusing the pcb + - connections, running it through the contact board, but not before some better heatsinking.

I still can’t almost believe how this tiny thing can produce so much light :bigsmile:
Big thanks to DBCstm Dale and djozz 2 for making me want to do it and inspiring me :wink:

that QTC stuff is very interesting. if you hadn’t tried it I would have called it a bunch of baloney. Still too expensive for me though.

Hi pilotdog, yeah QTC is interesting i don’t know why it isn’t used more for flashlights.

Rated for over one million compressions.
The maximum specified voltage is 40V, maximum current is 10 Amps.
Temperature variation (for a current of 1microA) shows an approximately linear increase in the resistance (R=63MOhm to R=1240MOhm) observed from 25°C to 180°C.
Each piece is 4x4x1 mm.

Check out this video

Unfortunately they don’t survive that many twists in a twisty if you don’t protect them from the spring somehow, but that is why they sell them in 3 pack :slight_smile: i will have to see how long they last when in direct contact on the bottom spring like they are now.

I hope you noticed my updated measurement on the shelf width, last time i gave you a 13,6mm measurement but it is narrower at the bottom so it is only 12,4mm wide.

cool. Like I said in the other thread, I’m not planning to go very hard, so I just ordered an XP-G2 on a 12mm aluminum star from fasttech. I’ll try wights 12mm driver once my oshpark order gets in.

Have you got yours jexree mini yet? please keep me updated on your build when you get on with it.

I was a little worried of the reflector quality because those ugly rings from the stock XP-E, but with the XP-L the beam is much much nicer than i could even hope for, i really wonder how it would look with a dedomed xp-l, i guess the only way to know is to get a 10mm sinkpad II with a XP-L 1A and try it :wink: i hope LEDDNA get some more sinkpad 10mm soon.

I got the light about a week ago. I probably won’t spend as much time on it as I had originally planned. The light is very good as it is, but the twisty isn’t my favorite. Hopefully it will be better after I get some lube on it.

I’ll either post my findings here or start my own thread.

I lubed the threads on mine with Artisana Organic Raw Coconut Oil :slight_smile: they felt really gritty before that, i only use food grade lube on flashlights & knifes, although i am sure that using some silicon grease like NyoGel would improve the smoothness even further.

If you are still searching for a better aaa/10440 host please let me know if you find one or get a lead on one, i plan to build a couple for gifting and this looked like the best one i have found yet, but i find since i got in to this hobby that i am always game to try some new budget flashlights, especially if they are a possible great host for mods :slight_smile:

Love the QTC idea cajampa. Just ordered some.

Kind of weird. Looking at the CFP threads, it this stuff has really climbed price wise.

I like using food-grade mineral oil on my knives. Coconut oil sounds like it would be better because it is thicker. I'll be trying that out too. Thanks for sharing all these need neat ideas. :)

I have some silicone grease in the mail. I had been using white lithium, but it was making the o-rings swell.

I ordered an sf-348 at the $5 price. I think I’ll like the clicky, but it will probably be tougher to get a new driver in.

@ImA4Wheelr Thanks, my head is filled with countless great ideas from this place so it feels great to give back a little :slight_smile:

Now i have the qtc set up so when i twist the top part full i get a nice maybe 150-200 lumens (but the hot spot is quite wide and soft so it is less blinding than one would think) and if i press the bottom i can get instant MAX :bigsmile: or i can fine tune the level from the bottom, or get even lower by twisting the top a tiny bit less.

When i change the battery i take it out from the top gently and collect the qtc square from the bat - , because it is the twisting action that wear it out prematurely, and then replace it on the new full battery and gently thread the flashlight body over the battery so the qtc ends up on the bottom spring, before i started to do that i saw some of wear on the qtc and it got off center easily with much less control over the lumens output.
It is kind of fun it is almost like the “qtc driver” is an organic analog part of the flashlight now it is weird to think about when you are used to the driver be an rigid driver with a lot of electronic components on it, the qtc feels more alive…….harder to control but with more control to give.

I think i would be possible to have it sandwiched maybe by the bottom spring or in a copper top on the spring or maybe on top of the driver board it should be possible to enclose it so it is not twisted anymore but only pushed, if it would show to wear out or if i would find i have the need to change battery in the dark :slight_smile: and get tired of keeping track of the tiny little qtc square.

I think i lose a tiny bit of output from max on DD to max on gtc probably under 100 lumens, but without side by side comparison or proper lumens measurement it is impossible to be certain.

@pilotdog68, o ring swell hmm that i hadn’t thought about, i wonder how long it would take for something like that to show up……. thanks for making me look out for that, that should hopefully make me take notice before it is to late.

Besides flashlights as a hobby, i like to build budget water filtration systems for me, my friends & family(you can build crazy cheap builds from Chinese imports parts just like with flashlights), and for that the best recommended lube for all those massive 10 & 20 inch o rings for the filter housings, is an approved for food production machinery grade silicon called Dow Corning Molykote 111 Silicone Compound, that i know is the last thing that would swell o rings and it is food production approved also, i wonder if flashlight silicon grease is food grade, anyway for now at least until my first o ring swell i will probably just use the not only food grade but the most delicious and an actual food :wink: raw organic coconut oil.

Thanks for the SF-348 tips, it looks very slim, but a solid pill & screw on bezel sounds like a nice possible 10440 host :-), do you know how wide the driver is and how deep the driver area is?

I was thinking similar for protecting the QTC. Was thinking maybe under a copper disk under the tail spring. I read the QTC's are slightly magnetic. Is that the case with yours? If yes, do they have a weak magnetic fields?

BLF Member _the_ measured the driver at 10.1mm here.

Do you or pd68 have any recommended sources for 10440 cells?

I got my efest from illumn.com. Mtnelectronics.com has them as well

Thanks for that link. The dimensions are really tight, it looks like I have a Tiny10DD in my near future

Thank you pilotdog68. I'll check them out.

Yes under a copper disk could work, but the spring that is in there now on the jexree mini is kind of pressfitted in so it may keep it completely compressed when under it, the spring sits in a hole thats just maybe large enough for a qtc if it is not i don’t think it would break if one would trim the edges a bit on it.

I don’t really know how to test if it is slightly magnetic? it is at least not magnetic enough to not fall of a battery - end when upside down.

BUT i have some small 1,5mm 5mm wide Neodymium magnets from fasttech and that kind of works for a protection, it would probably work better if i get some smaller 1mm and wider ones……so i will buy some, i will probably have solved it before i even get them, but a reason to buy some more fun magnets is a gift in it self :wink: and it is always nice to have a backup plan in the mail if i fail.
And the slightly magnetic question, could that be why they seem to have poles when i use the Neodymium on them, and as far as i know there should be only one producer of qtc Peratech so all are most likely the same.

For Efest 10440, you will probably have much easier to get from trusted sources living in the US check those Pilotdog68 suggested, to get some here in Sweden i ordered from fstoplights.com in Singapore, next time it might be http://www.akkula.fi/

That sf-348 looks to be a super tight build, we will have to use every trick in the book to fit a new led star & driver in that, i still hold out hope for that some day in the future wight will try to do a 10mm single sided slim fet driver with tiny tiny components on it to make i fit :slight_smile: but until then we will have to make do with what we have available.

Good points about the using the QTC under the tail spring. I was thinking it would help hold everything in place, but I hear you on it possibly not allowing the QTC to decompress. Really looking forward to playing with these QTC's. I love problems like these.

So, no real magnetism. Was hoping they could securely hold a thin iron disk.

It may work if one would turn the spring upside down………but then the question is if the spring will connect by the sides of the hole it sits in and then it would bypass the QTC………

I checked the available fasttech magnets, i think the 1mmx10mm or 1mmx9mm should fit the best or possible the 8mm wide ones.

Yeah this is fun, do you have the jexree mini or the LZZ-06? and what kind of mod besides the QTC have you planned for it? or is it some other twisty?
If i succeed in encapsulate the pressing twisting force, i would like to try to use it in a BLF X6 so i can run it DD + QTC, the big head feels great as a two handed twisty but the big spring is way to large for a simple drop in test run, hmm i should probably buy some of the wider magnets if this turn out to be the solution.

One slightly annoying thing when the QTC is laying openly like this is that after ever battery change or opening and moving of the qtc, it feels different, so it is a bit hard to find the correct movement again to get the intended action, if one could stabilize that so even if its quirky and sensitive to very small movements it is at least the same movements that get the same reaction, now it is like a new tuning in process every time you take it apart………or it may also be that i have only played around with it for very short time…….