Hello everybody!
A long time lurker has registered a month ago to this nice forum and has his first question:
My SkyRay 3xT6 3800 died last July after maybe 60 minutes of on and off use (and, from what I read, it wasn't the only one).
I finally came around to looking for and ordering a driver from Kaidomain that seemed to be a suitable replacement. After I had taken the SkyRay's head apart and desoldered the original driver, I found out (to my surprise) that one of the LEDs had died (does that ever happen?*), so I also ordered a T6 on a round 16 mm PCB (I felt lucky that I found one as most dealers seem to have the XM-L only bare or on a star). When today I've replaced the dead LED, I didn't bother resoldering the original driver to find out whether or not it, too, was fried and went with the new driver instead.
I'm glad to report that the flashlight works like new (drawing 3.7 tailcap amps on high, both with flamed Trustfires and Redilasts; I don't remember the current with the original driver), but now I'm hesitant to run it on high for longer than a minute or so.
My question is regarding Kaidomain's instruction to "smash the thermally conductive adhesive and filled it between circuit board and body to make it better to thermally conductive". Enclosed with the driver are four small blocks of grey matter - apparently the thermal adhesive. It can probably be somehow molded so that it bridges a gap between driver and flashlight body, but I'm baffled as to where to put it. It isn't supposed to be somehow squeezed under the inductor (messy) and between the two PCBs (next to impossible) and spread all over the SMD components, is it? It would make very poor, if any, contact to the aluminum pill/head of the SkyRay unless Kaidomain sends me another ten blocks to fill the whole space in which the driver sits. And I've never seen anything like a driver fully embedded in a glob of thermal compound.
I found a post on a Russian forum with a photo of the stuff (but in a different flashlight). Looks like he actually planned on pressing the driver into the thermal compound.
You can see images of the assembled head of my Skyray halfway down in this BLF thread (I had originally posted them on CPF). I've wrapped and stuffed aluminum foil into the hollow space between head and body.
Any ideas on whether at all / how to use the thermal compound? I'd be kind of bummed if the SkyRay died on me again.
Thanks & regards,
pezie
*Looks like it does! I just read on another forum that two people have the same problem (one LED dead) with their Nitecore TM11's (unlike in my SkyRay, you can even see the cracked dome). Maybe my SkyRay's driver wasn't the culprit after all and an LED overheated. When reassembling the SkyRay, I've cleaned the head and LEDs from the original thermal compound and replaced it with Arctic Silver; maybe that improves the (overall dismal) heat transfer by a wee tiny fraction.