Howdy, guys. It’s been a while for me after recovering from my shoulder surgery. This is my first mod after getting, kinda well. I have a lot of catching up to do with mods for members but I thought I would try doing one quick one for myself before getting back to work. LOL
Pilot dog did a mini review on the light here and I agree with his assessment.
No camera going today so I’ll just have to talk you guys through it. I figured that there would be a few of you guys with the older SST-50 emitters laying around. I had one so I thought this might be a good time to try one in a zoomie.
The pill on this light does come out. It’s screwed in with the threads in the normal position, but you might have to really reef on it to get it to start moving. Maybe a little glue in there or something. The pill is really cheap aluminum with large slits cut in it in the form of an X. Not exactly great for thermal management. Not a hollow pill but close to it.
To overcome this I put in one of International outdoors huge noctigons for MT-G2’s. The SST-50 emitter can be reflowed right onto an MT-G2 noctigon with no problems and the largest one they have fits right in this light. Just a little room around the edges but it fixes the heat transfer issue. Add some good thermal grease to the pill before screwing it back in and it transfers heat pretty well.
The pill is large enough that you can wipe the driver clean and use it as a contact board and then wire a BLF DD zenor mod driver under that and then into the emitter. Direct drive from a good high amp 26650 cranks the lumens way up on this emitter. I de-domed mine and with the SST-50 this is as simple as it gets. Just heat it up a little and the dome will pull right off very cleanly. De-domed the SST-50 is about the size of an XML emitter with the dome left on and throws about the same.
The beam focuses perfectly with this mod and it’s a thrower but in flood it’s also extremely bright. In flood mode it’s a perfect circle of light with absolutely zero rings in the beam.
If you are going to do this with another emitter I would really suggest cutting out the top of the pill and replacing it with a copper or aluminum disc. The huge noctigon does the job but a smaller noctigon would be a problem because of how the pill is semi-hollow.
So anyway, if you have a SST-50 (or 90 even) laying about and want to make up a really powerful zoomie this is a cool light to do it with.
Oh one more thing, on lights that have emitters larger than an XML I strongly suggest using a zenor mod driver. Even though it’s only being driven by a single battery the extra high amps used with these larger emitters can kill the driver’s MCU without one. This can also be true with multi-emitter lights like the SRK. Same goes for the Phatlight emitters. Just because it’s a single battery or batteries in parallel doesn’t mean the amps can’t get high enough to need the bi-pass that the zenor diod provides.