In stock form, it’s the centering ring that is controlling the distance between the emitter and the reflector. A thicker mcpcb won’t change anything while that thick centering ring is in place.
The only way you will reliably find the best focus for a given setup is to buy a light meter and then try different focal distances. The human eye is simply not sensitive enough to tell the difference in most cases.
True, but if you can’t lower the reflector you can raise the emitter and with a better mcpcb to boot since it seems the spacer has to go anyway.
If you want to lower the reflector more simply sand down the top of the light some, it will be hidden once the light is assembled anyways. I did this earlier today when I built a C8 with XP-L2 (which turned out great, really like this combo). You might also have to sand down the bottom of the bezel to get the reflector to full seat.
Unlike a lot of people I prefer the lights will pills in most cases, they are just simply easier to work with and mod. In this case you could simply adjust the pill height and boom, perfect focus.
Turning down the centering ring to 0.48-0.50mm bottoms the reflector at the outter lip. At this point the bezel threads all the way on to the bottom of threads. I think the bezel is bottoming out before the top of flashlight body. So I may turn it down a little.
I also put some thin tape shims around the relector bell where it sits in the flashlight body to take up slack and self center. See post #19 above & zoom in on 1st image of reflector.
I down loaded a lux app just for comparison measurements (not calibrated) and got about 17% increase with the shaved spacer ring vs stock. The meter is kinda tricky as the values jump around alot, so I just tried to take the peak values. Is that how everyone else does it?
