Just blew one of the LEDs of my Sky Ray 3800 triple XM-L (DRY owners might want to take note)

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

Put in 3 fully charges trustfire flames and measured 4.21, 4.20, 4.20 for my cells. Got 4.4A with the DMM, not sure how much is it through the switch but i have measured this and it dropped only 0.2A in series. Was measuring some ceiling bounce and cycled through the modes, came into strobe and it blinked like about 1 second and there was no light.

The history is that the SR3800 driver fried, as you'd know it, and i wired it as direct-drive with no driver, and then put in a DRY 3-mode turbo driver. I thought that the driver could have fried but nope...

I tested with 1 cell and some thin wires with croc clips, 2 LEDs could light and 1 could not.

Luckily i have 1 spare CW XM-L but it is 20mm star. This is 16mm i believe. BTW the MCPCB can be cut easily with a cutter right? Need to trim it down.

What i think happened was that in strobe mode, when it switches off and on, it created additional stress on a emitter wires or something, and something broke inside. This is because nothing happened for a good 30 seconds before that when i was gunning in DD. The cells would have mellowed down a bit as well.

DRY owners, pls take note, try not to use strobe when you have just recharged the cells. As i have said, to be safe, let the light run a few minutes in HIGH mode first before doing Turbo. Really no additional output past 4 amps.

2

I've fried two LEDs doing DD runs with the SR3800. I just use it as a toy and have a number of CW XMLs that I've extracted from other lights (to swap in NW), so I just grab one of those and voila it is back up and running for more torture. :)

And yes, they are 16mm PCBs.

3

I had some fun with my FryRay 3800 LEDs direct drive too, after its driver fried! Fried two LEDs (different times).

I'm now looking for some kind of drop-in that will fit the 3800 drop-in host (flashlight body).

Not sure if there is anything out there?

4

Yeah...good to hear that it's 16mm. BTW, the MCPCBs can be cut/snipped easily right? Softer type of metal?

5

Unprotected batteries?

6

I trimmed an MCPCB with aviation snips and then used a very fine file to deburr the edges and make sure that there were no metal slivers shorting the conductors to each other or to the MCPCB.

7

No, they are the replacement Trustfire Flames Protected from Dinodirect. They got 2250-2300mAh @ 1A so they are pretty good in my books (Benckie said that his best ones are getting over 2400mAh). Never knew that they are so powerful....hehe... I tried with XTAR 2600s fully charged and they tripped the PCB protection before the emitters burned out.

Or maybe it's time for them to RIP, round after round of DD abuse.... Heat damage is accumulative.

8

You can see here that protected batteries allow pretty high currents before the protection is tripped. So you don't get much protection is that sense.