Hi, being new to this forum I'd like to share my latest mod on the E09 from Tank007.
This flashlight has always been my favorite EDC because of its great build quality, its ability to run 10440 and because it is so tiny. Nevertheless, driver and LED are a little bit outdated meanwhile as it is available for several years now with no update wrt driver or LED. Well, owning several E09s I decided to mod one of them.
First problem when wanting to mod an E09 is usually to get the head open because in most cases the two parts of the heads are heavily glued together as well as the driver that is glued in with epoxy. But this seems to have changed over time: My first one has a S/N starting with "2" which indicated the production year and in this case I think means it was produced in 2011. That one is heavily glued together as well as the last ones I ordered for friends at the end of last year. But another one from my collection starting with 4 (2013 IIRC) wasn't glued and could be disassembled easily, so I've chosen that for modding.
Some time ago I've already swapped the emitter, at first for an XM-L2 (far too wide beam angle for my taste), and later for an XP-L HI (much better). Recently I read about 1xAAA lights modded with FET drivers and saw this Post of testedandbaked where he modded a Lumintop Tool by replacing the driver with a FET+1 one. I asked myself: could this be done with an E09 too? And then decided to give it a try.
So I ordered some of wight's 12mm FET+1 10440 driver boards, the MTN-12DD kit, an Atmel Tiny 13a, some AMC 7135, and a Nichia 219c on 16mm Noctigon (as I couldn't find any 12mm DTP boards) that I would have to file down to 12mm. This was the first time I assembled a driver, and because everything is so tiny and also because I didn't trust my soldering skills
, driver assembly was done using solder paste (Edsyn CR44) and a heat gun. I've chosen the lowest air flow setting and adjusted the temperature setting of the heat gun so that I measured a temperature of about 230C 20cm in front of the gun. To my surprise, everything went allright besides a single short at the FET. I heated it up again, removed the FET and the remaining solder paste underneath it, put new paste on the board (this time a little bit less), and reflowed it again. The tiny13 was pressed flat onto the board and together with the resistor on the battery side was soldered by hand. A functionality test using a lab power supply showed that it worked - hooray!
The biggest problem was the heatsink. Whoever designed this little flashlight may know the meaning of the very big hole in the body directly beneath the LED MCPCB - that absolutely makes no sense and they just filled it with a dollop of thermal paste. (See for example this picture from Chloe's review of the E09.)
I decided to fill the hole and to add some thermal mass to the head by putting a proper piece of alu inside the head. Luckily, a colleague of mine got a lathe and made me a suitable piece (11,0mm diameter, total height 5.3mm) from an aluminium rod.
(The picture also shows the filed down 16mm Noctigon with Nichia 219c which unfortunately got scratched during the filing
, so I replaced it later on with a new NVSW219CT D280-300/R8000 5000K - reflowing was done on my clothing iron
)
The new alu heatsink fits nicely into the head of the E09:
A metal sheet cut from a cable clip and serving as BAT+ contact was JB welded on top of the Tiny13 and soldered to the board on one side:
As the space between the driver and the alu heatsink is very small and to prevent the heatsink from shorting I put a piece of KOPTAN tape I got from FT
on it's backside after drilling the holes for the cables . Moreover, I removed the anodization on the inside of the head where the heatsink will sit as well as on the outside where the MCPCB will make contact:
Additionally, I put some pieces of the insulation of a 14AWG silicone wire onto the 22AWG wires of the driver to cover the solder joints and to prevent them from making contact with the alu heatsink:
Eventually, the aluminium heatsink was glued into the E09's head using Artic Alumina thermal adhesive:
To accomodate for the greater thickness of the Noctigon MCPCB compared to the original one, I filed down the reflector a little bit from top as well as from the bottom side and put Kapton tape on the downside of the reflector tp prevent it from shorting the LED contacts. Putting it all together and inserting an Efest IMR, it... didn't work! More specific, it worked, but only after tightening it real hard - otherwise, the flashlight tube didn't make contact with the driver board because of the exalted plus terminal. One-hand use was definitively impossible, which was rather frustrating after putting so much effort into this mod.
Luckily, I found a solution for this problem: In my spare parts box, I found a broken Thrunite Ti3, and the pill of this light exactly fits inside the E09! So I made a driver retaining ring from the Ti3's pill by cutting a slice out of it, sanded and polished it, and screwed it into the head of the E09, thereby fastening the driver. The height of this retaining ring is between 1 and 2mm. To be able to get the head over the o-ring of the body (i.e. to preserve the waterproofness) when closing it, I shortened the body by filing down about 1-2mm from the top of the body. Additionally, I replaced the spring of the E09 with the little bit shorter one of the Ti3.
Finally, it works as before (can be turned on/off using one hand only), but is of course much brighter! On turn-on, with an Efest IMR, I measure 4.4A using my clamp meter which I think should yield about 1000 lumens. (Oddly, the two other Efest IMRs I got only deliver about 3A. None of them is older than 2 years, and they have not been used much. What could be the reason for this significant differences? Do these batteries have that much variation in their electrical properties?). Of course being so tiny and light, this little beast gets insanely hot after a very short amount of time - after 30s on turbo, its already very hot. After 45s, you can barely hold it in your hand. And after 1 minute, it is too hot to hold it in your hand. Well, at least the heat transfer seems to work well
Only thing left is the centering of the LED. I filed down a bit too much from the 16mm Noctigon and cut the wires very short. I will probably resolder these wires again to get the LED centered. BTW, would you keep the Nichia 219c 5000K or would you replace it with e.g. a XP-L HI? Would that generate less heat but shorter runtime because of the higher Vf of the Cree? I got another E09 where I just replaced the emitter by a XP-L HI, and this gives a smaller hotspot, e.g. more throw.
