On Sunday, I noticed bikenber73 posted a deal alert for a Rofis TR31 flashlight on Amazon for $10.
I’d spent most of the weekend exploring options for 26650 hosts, and in the process I’d realized that I could probably do with an 18650 light or two to experiment with, so, I decided to jump on it, knowing nothing much about the light, beyond it being a Rofis, who seem to have a decent reputation.
The light came today and of course, I had to check it out. I even remembered to put a battery in it and turn it on before I took it apart.
I was a little thrown by the fact that I had to hold the button for the better part of a second before it turned on. From there, I flicked through the modes a few times, and then set to work inspecting it more closely.
The tube and tail are turned and milled from a single piece of metal and there looks to be enough room for a protected 18650. The head is a meaty chunk of aluminum with an integrated shelf for the MCPCB and topped with a stainless steel bezel. The anodizing looks and feels great, as good as any of my other lights (including an a v1 BLF X6-SE and a BLF A6). So far, so good!
Whoops, not so fast. The gap between the bezel and the head is a little uneven, but nothing worth fretting about. On the other hand, I noticed that emitter didn’t look well centered, definitely problematic. Rotating the light to make sure it isn’t an optical illusion confirms the fault and also suggests that there is no spacer/centering ring. Oh well, I’ll just have to open it up, void the warranty, and see what I can do.
Easier said than done. The bezel threads seem to be glued. After a few minutes with a heat gun, the mass of aluminum in the head was too hot to touch for more than an instant. I wrapped it in a washcloth and then struggled to figure out how to apply enough torque to the bezel to turn. I was considering breaking out some channel locks before hitting on the method that ended up working. I found a meaty screw driver, pressed hard against the bezel, up against the crenelations, and then applied as much torque as I could. It worked! After a quarter turn or so with the lever, I was able to twist it the rest of the way off by hand. Once free, I could see the ruby schmoo that had been applied to keep me from removing the bezel. I broke/scraped as much of it away with a bamboo skewer and then cleaned the rest out with solvent in preparation for eventual reassembly.
I was confused at first by what I found after removing the bezel, glass and reflector. The star looked like it had a bite taken out of it! There were no screws securing it, but there was a screw off in the area of the shelf where the missing part of the star would have been. Was it there to hold in some of the driver components below? I could see some thermal goop smeared from under the star. The star moved freely when I nudged it, so it was thermal grease, not adhesive.
I took out the mystery screw. It was short and had some reversible thread locking glue on it. As I unscrewed it, the pieces started falling into place. The light was $10 because finally assembly was performed by a team of morons!
The star was designed with the bite taken out of it, but it was also backed by a substantial amount of copper. It was supposed to be installed 180° from how it was, which would allow the screw to clamp down on a (single) notch in the PCB.
As I thought about my options for fixing the unfixed star, I realized that the person responsible for installing the star may not have been a complete moron (but their boss and co-workers clearly were). They may just have been doing their best to work around the fact that the leads from the driver had been threaded through the holes in the shelf backwards (positive where negative should be, and vice versa). The leads weren’t long enough to reach if the star was secured in the proper orientation. Rethreading them probably wasn’t an option for the worker, and may not be for me, either.
I thought I could just desolder the star, remove the driver and rethread the leads in the proper orientation. At least I did until I realized the driver was glued in! I’m not sure what it will take to break it loose, and I’m a bit worried I’ll find potting compound on the other side.
At this point, I think my best option is probably to find a suitable centering ring and reassemble the light and just use it as is. Beyond that, I could put in a new star/LED, one without a bite taken out of it, that I could screw down. Or, I can work on getting the driver loose and go from there.
Tl;dr? The Rofis TR31 seems like a good, solid light, but the low $10 price I paid Amazon was almost surely the result of some assembly flaws, and remedying them is made more difficult because the driver is glued in.
Did anyone else get one of these lights for ~$10, recently? How does yours look?
