Greetings,
I’ve been a flashlight fanatic as long as I can remember and recently caught on to the world of modding flashlights.
I’ll be lurking around and dusting off the soldering iron in the coming weeks, thinking of beginning by building out a couple of S2’s as they seem pretty inexpensive to get into.
Any helpful beginner links or thoughts are appreciated.
-Sofa
It's a pleasure to have you onboard, Sofa!
Some tools that I’ve found helpful:
Tweezers : For carefully gripping onto and moving parts around, like the LED emitter, wires, reflector, etc.
Wire cutter/stripper : Sometimes the wires that are already soldered onto the drivers are longer than you need. Sometimes you need to solder your own wires onto a driver.
Rubber gloves : Sometimes you need a really good GRIP on the flashlight body to unscrew that bezel or retaining ring or whatever.
File : For filing down the edge of drivers so they’ll fit inside the pill.
Pliers : For solidly gripping onto things, like the pill or LED emitter.
Thermal paste/adhesive : For transferring heat from the LED emitter onto the pill. I’ve used Arctic Silver 5, but it’s not an adhesive, so you’d need something else to keep pressure on the LED emitter against the pill. Sometimes pressure comes from the reflector. Sometimes you have screws to hold down the LED emitter.
I’ve also used Fujik Thermal Glue, which does get sticky if you give it a few hours (or overnight), but I’ve heard it doesn’t trasfer heat that well, so it might not be good for high powered flashlights. Someone suggested using the AS5 in the middle of the emitter and Fujik at the edges as an adhesive, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Super lube : For greasing up the threads so unscrewing the head or tailcap is much smoother.
Test leads : I connect test leads from the battery to the driver to make sure the LED works and there are no short circuits before I reassemble the flashlight.
Snap ring pliers : For sticking into the holes of retaining rings so I can turn them and remove them. Sometimes tweezers work if the retaining ring isn’t on too tight.
Camera : If modding an existing flashlight, before removing the LED, take a quick pic of what it looks like, particulary which wire is positive and negative. I ran into a flashlight that didn’t use the usual red/black wire colors. When I was about to install the new LED emitter, it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea which wire was positive and which was ground.
Multimeter : For testing battery voltages. Also for continuity testing (make sure your model has this) to test if circuits are connected or not. The continuity test helped solve which wire was positive and which was ground.
Calipers : For measuring how wide of an LED emitter or driver will fit into an existing flashlight, so I know what parts to order.
Patience : Gotchas will certainly pop up, requiring a lot of thought and patience to work through them.
Once you start modding, you won’t want to stop, especially if you have a bunch of older or cheap flashlights with a color temperature you don’t like.
One of my most valuable tools is a desktop magnifying lamp. 10x. Reflector shorts are very common, pre tin any parts you need to solder and go for low rise solder bumps.
Welcome to the forum! And no, we don’t call noobs the FNG here…. 