If you can give me some idea of what was going on with it when it quit working, any problems you were having with it at the time or anything like that, it might help find the issue more quickly. I’ll need the entire light, to rule out a broken solder joint in the battery carrier or anything like that. I know how Justin went about building it, probably something relatively simple wrong with it now, will just have to go in and see.
Not really Sure… I have a cottage that I take that light as well one that 18sixfifty made as my 2 go to lights. It was working last summer while I was there. I hadn’t used it in a while and over the Winter I went to use it at home and it wouldn’t work. I did have an issue with the power button. Every once in a while I had to press it a couple times for it to come on but it wasn’t a normal thing…
I figured that in a build like this the most likely candidate for something going wrong was in some of the soldering that had to take place. Justin changed the battery carrier and how the cells interact with the driver contact board, and it was here that the problem was… one of the copper discs that Justin had soldered to the outer ground ring had broken loose. And one of the brass locator pins for the tail pcb where you remove cells had also come out.
Seems that Justin only soldered the copper disc at the very edge, didn’t glue it to the board. So I repaired it by gluing it down with JB Weld and re-soldering the ground contact. Also added solder bumps to the discs so they’d contact the negative end of the cell solidly.
Put the locator back in and soldered the two of em to be sure they were staying, and it works fine. I have 4 cells in it with the tail cap snugged down in order to press the copper disc in place and am allowing the JB Weld to finish curing. This evening I’ll make sure the solder is good at the ground ring and re-enforce it as needed.
Not sure if this was wanted, but I, uh, bumped it.
The converted tail pcb with it’s solder wick bypassed springs seemed to not be pressed into the ground contacts inside the body by the tail cap, so I was looking at what would be a good way to ensure this would happen when the tail cap was screwed down, and also could it be done to improve current. Justin cut the traces on the top of the pcb and made it 2S2P in configuration, tying the two cells together with 20ga Teflon wire. So, I looked through the kit I bought from Justin and found some 14 Ga wire. Cut a couple of these and soldered them in beside the Teflon wires to do 2 things, both carry more current and also be thick enough with the silicone sheath’s to assist the tail cap in pressing down firmly enough to assure ground.
This worked to the extent of bumping output from 5064.6 lumens to 6285.9 lumens, this on freshly charged LG HE-4 button tops.
I’m going to highly recommend gluing the body to the head to keep from doing damage to the driver board and it’s 2 copper discs. I have it screwed together quite snugly, but it’d be best to glue it.
Must be some kind of record… received at 10:00 AM yesterday morning, put it back in the hands of UPS at 9:00 AM this morning, 23 hours turnaround and 1221 lumens brighter to boot.