I upgraded my mother’s SRK. It was completely stock, one of the first batch of SRKs available in black, and IIRC it did 2500 lumens in a cool white tint. I gave it a 32x7135 driver with the Ferrero Rocher ramping UI, which should increase output a bit and lets it ramp to any of 64 levels from moon to about 3000 lumens.
It’s pretty close to what the BLF Q8 was originally intended to be.
I think it’s funny that she calls it “the small light”, given that a SRK is one of my biggest lights. But then, “the big light” is a Fenix TK75, so I guess that’s fair. I’ll have to borrow the TK75 sometime to upgrade it too. It could really use a set of XP-L HI emitters.
Your mum is a lucky girl TK. I cant imagine my mum with a light like that. She’d probably have a heart attack.
The Ferrero Rocher firmware you used. Did it need modifying to work on the 32 x 7135 driver?
While I haven’t got any tools to measure the actual difference, my subjective experience is pretty similar to what you hypotesized. I used a lee filters zircon minus green 4 which should be equivalent to the 1/8 minus green and while high now looks like pure white the low modes are still a bit too greenish for my taste.
Because I mostly use the low modes, I’m thinking about trying a minus green 3, it would cut 20% output compared to stock but that’s a hardly noticeable difference in output in exchange for a big difference in tint.
I don’t think the glass is the problem with this light, but rather the binning of the led, which puts most emitters above the bbl ( 5000k red circle in the image )
Not really. I calibrated the voltage and turned off the red/green indicators, but that was about all it needed. It makes high-pitched noise on some modes, but she can’t hear it.
It’s not as nice as Narsil, but I don’t have Narsil drivers hanging around, so this was as close as I could get.
Ah, it could be an emitter tint issue. I wouldn’t generally expect that from a high-CRI light, but I haven’t tried many EZwhite emitters.
It’s too bad Zebralights are so difficult to open or modify. I’d love to take the lens off and find out how it looks on a white cloth. For example, here’s what happened when I put an Olight S10 lens next to a plain piece of glass. I’ve seen similar results from other brands, but have never been able to test a Zebralight this way:
Put a UCLp lens on white paper and it virtually disappears… smaller sizes in glass are the same.
Edit: Pics… The Eagle Eye X5 came with a quite nice but thin AR coated glass lens. It’s the one on the left in the following pictures. On the right is a UCL glass lens to fit this X5 light. Water white glass, best coating in the industry, bar none.
Eagle Eye lens over the flashlight, as lit by the custom X5 with High CRI Nichia 219B emitter.
flashlightlens.com UCL lens over the flashlight, again as lit by the X5 with High CRI Nichia 219B emitter. (both had the light in mule configuration, reflector to the side.)
Side by side with the flashlight underneath, in mule configuration. The green visible in the blurred background is the battery box.
Pics as taken by the Canon 1DsMkII, jpegs, SOOC (straight out of camera). I cropped to show like size images of each, no further adjustments aside from my watermark applied.
Neither of those two, after cutting a circle that fit in the bezel reasonably well, I spread some super attak as thin as possible on a sheet of paper and rolled the edge of the circle on it, then put it on the light (I made a quick representation so it’s clear ).
This way it sticks strongly, there is no glue between the filter and the glass interfering with its optical properties, and it should be easy to remove without leaving much residue.
I highly recommend UV hardened Display glue to glue the full area of the filter that way there is no gap producing losses reflecting light back inside the flashlight
This is the cheapest way that I know of to get some good lumens out of these cheap SRK's The copper disks I use come from "Metals Direct". I then work them down to the right size with an angle grinder and a file, finish them off by using a disc sander, working my way down to fine grit. I use a good thermal epoxy to bond the two together. Do this first and then you can drill out holes right where the holes are on the original MCPC.
You can then piggy back a BLF driver with a low resistance FET. If you want to go whole hog you can mount noctigons but I find that as long as you are not using super high amp batteries this works fairly well. Because I build my own drivers and the copper is fairly cheap it's just about a $6 mod. This light I did a little more and added three High CRI neutral XM-L2's to the mix. I found them too dark to use on their own but when mixed with cool white emitters, they are really nice. Someone had them on sale a while back and I bought a bunch of them. So altogether this was about a $14 mod for me and it's now hitting about 4,000 lumens OTF and the tint and beam are superb. Ramping driver and although it does have parasitic drain it locks out easy enough. (Need to start doing Tom's driver instead). I won the light on evil bay for $11. So it's a total of $25. Not bad for such a nice finished product.
I have old maglite magcharger. I tried to disassemble it and then I managed and yet I had no clue how to modd this light so I give up. That is something completely different to modd than classic lights.
