Removed the driver retaining ring revealed the driver was fully seated in its slot and in the correct position.
Removed bezel and optic and inspected traces under magnifying lens near the optic legs. They looked good… not shifted over to either side. Since those traces looked good I didn’t bother to remove the screws.
used DMM to test for continuity between driver spring and body.
Since everything looked good I reassembled the light and turned it on with an Efest purple 18350 inside. WOW! Really bright.
I then tried the 18650 tube, which I’d also ordered from Banggood simultaneously with the S41. I used a Samsung 30Q 18650. Even brighter … but wow does that copper heatsink get hot fast on turbo!!!
Looks like my sample doesn’t have any of the defects others are reporting. Both the 18350 and 18650 tubes work great.
I tried it with the clip side towards the light at first and it didn’t light and I was real dissapointed till i swapped ends around and it worked. I ordered this tube at the same time as the light so I don’t have an early BLF A6 tube. As it happens my unanodized A6 long and short tube both work.
Chances are it’s only missing making contact by a very slim margin. If you have some coaxial cable laying around, pull a bit of the copper core out of a piece and make a ring with it that fits inside the driver area… you can use the end of the battery tube as a guide. Lay this copper ring in on top of the driver, screw in the tube, voila! (ok, well, it should work anyway) If you can solder you might solder the ends of the copper wire so you know it’s not going to distort and cause issues, you could even place a solder blob on two sides to stick the solder to the driver or retaining ring, either way, under the ring or on top of it, should work fine.
If you just lay it in on top of the retaining ring, simply remember to pull the cell from the rear for charging purposes and that ring will stay in there indefinitely.
Edit: Also, since these are Direct Drive FET drivers, you can use a cell like the Panasonic B or BD to semi-limit total output and have greater run time from the higher capacity cell. There are other makes that perform well too, choose the 3400mAh cells and let their limitations be a limiting factor to keep the light from overheating. (so quickly. )
Look if the tube is anodized in one or the other side.If it is,the current can not pass.I had this situation with the small original tube,so I sanded off it and the light is now OK.
Well this is the sad news received today regarding my order on 16th May:
We are sorry to tell you that the items 1054876 [ Design;CREE XP-G2] and [ Design;nichia 219B] were out of stock, and will be restocked in 8 to 10 days.
Thanks :+1: I think it’ll be a long time before I start modding. I can solder ok but not on these little things. Lol
I ordered the copper and SS from them in April and had quick service/despatch. The only downside with this order is the lack of info :cry: It wouldn’t be so bad if I had an email saying due to very popular demand there is a delay etc. But I had a pm on here from them saying end of May for delivery of there stock now it’s mid June.
You got me curious so I checked. It looks like I have the same, a back-ordered sample dated from the 20th. Not sure how that happened, exactly. Maybe when people were wondering out loud about who was getting samples, Neal decided to send some extras as a goodwill gesture?
Maybe if I can find an extra quad board it would be a good opportunity to make another wide-spectrum light. I wonder what XP-G2 tints Richard has in stock…
I can set you up with that quad board if you like TK, I should have one or two Dsche versions somewhere around here and I know I have a several of the new T-Pad ones.
My Astrolight S41 Nichia and 18650 tube from Banggood arrived yesterday. Everything passed inspection and worked perfectly.
I’d also ordered a Manker E14 XPG from Amazon. My plan was to mod the E14 and leave the S41 as-is.
…. good thing too. Moment I took the E14 out of the box I could see there is a problem. Looks like one of the LEDs is dedomed. Looks like Manker needs to invest a little more heavily in QA.
Would be an interesting build drilling a cavity in the side of the copper heatsink and then installing an electronic sideswitch. Not sure it would be very practical though as that heatsink gets HOT in a heavily driven light… and unfortunately there aren’t any e-switch drivers with temp sensors available for purchase.
From looking into the optic with the light off I noticed at first glance that there was clearly something wrong with one of the emitters as it didn’t have the same yellow phosphor visible. I guessed this was because of an accidental factory dedome. After I got home I removed the bezel and optic. All 4 XPG2s were in place and were not dedomed. However, only 3 of them lit up when power was applied. The 4th refused to turn on. The problem looks like a defective reflow at the factory. One of the emitters was angled slightly and wasn’t making connection.
Not too big a deal anyways since I’d purchased this light with the goal of replacing all the emitters with XPL HI or XPG3 anyways. I unfortunately hadn’t ordered enough XPG3, so I went with XPL HI. Reflow was accomplished without a hitch and all 4 emitters (now XPL HI) work fine. As a precaution, I reversed the polarity of the emitters on the star and the driver wires.
I had also planned to replace the stock driver with an H17F, but I ran into a problem: The stock driver is very firmly glued in place. This seems dumb to me… why glue the driver in place when the light has a driver retaining ring.
I wasn’t able to remove the driver by pulling the spring with a tweezers. Nor was I able to remove it by pressing through the LED leadwire hole with a thin screwdriver or narrow awl. If I really want to remove the driver it looks like I may have to use a blowtorch to melt the glue, or drill out and destroy the driver with a power drill. A blowtorch might damage the finish coating on the copper so the drill may be the safest option. There’s little risk the drill would damage the structure of the light, but it would destroy a perfectly good BLF A6 driver.
I ended up reassembling the light with 4XPL HI using the stock driver. I’ll decide what to do about replacing the driver later. My initial impressions of the light with just the emitter swap (no spring bypasses yet):
It’s very bright… much brighter than my S41 Nichia 219B.
On Efest purple IMR 18350 it’s much dimmer than my heavily modded Sunwayman C10R (Triple XPL HI, FET driver, Efest 18500 purple IMR. The C10R is slightly smaller and much lighter than the E14 with 18350 tube).
On a Samsung 30Q 18650 it’s slightly brighter than my C10R.
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