BLF style 18650 1s thrower( poor mans Olight M2X)

No problem MRsDNF :wink:

Jerommel drill very carefully and get luxmeter :slight_smile:

My next one will be done this way li did and see if it can reach my UT02 results for comparison :slight_smile:

A quick question … Is there any interest for this flashlight , but :

  • Sold as a host
  • Equipped with HQ pill made from brass that accepts 26mm mcpcb
  • Has fixed tube so it will be water resistant

My opinion:

  • Yes, sold as host would be best.
  • I can live with the stock pill, a brass one would add cost and not much benefit.
  • O-rings can make it water resistant too, and i personally like the option to tighten the pill towards the reflector from the rear.

I’m going to try you reflector mod on the next one I mod. If its good it will be a lot quicker modding them than making new pills.
This should also push the pill further out of the head allowing the battery tube to screw all the way in if I’m not mistaken.

A host could be nice, and I don’t think that a brass pill would make it much more expensive, but I would rather see a better designed reflector with solder blob clearance than a pill suitable for 26mm. Those Maxtoch boards are expensive, it would kill the ultra-budget advantage of this light.

Lights such as these should have a solar panel around the battery tube so they could charge all day and we could use them at night, then we wouldn’t have to buy expensive cells to power these cheap lights…

Yes. I am sure that you’ll like it better but note that you’ll have centering without centering ring here… You’ll have to perfectly center 16mm noctigon in the pill itself before final reflector centering (you can see in my pics that I used oring).

My solution for final centering since I added additional 16mm noctigon beneath main 16mm one was thin oring under upper part of reflector + when properly centered by hands and eye method by watching hotspot on high ceiling all is locked with super glue which is resistant to any harder abuse(like centerfire recoil).

I also had to to slightly ccw the pill since I removed original pill oring (pill is copper taped in my modd so I did not have any need for stupid original oring on the pill) and that made small gap on battery tube part but tube did screw all the way to the pill(pill support and better heat transfer) + everything thread locked and additional oring added so it is waterproof…

I am sure that there are maybe even better and easier methods for centering in “drill through reflector mode”. So I am really looking forward to see something different :+1:

That is certainly a disadvantage of removing the reflector base.
It’s why i decided to leave the base as is.

I did notice the reflector base kind of fits inside the pill rim.
But then i widened the LED shelf for a 20mm board. :slight_smile:

Thanks. I was wondering how you held the MCPCB to the pill.

Yes it fits inside pill rim but it does not matter that much for centering… As you can see in my pictures drilled reflector base can even be fitted to flat 26mm pill modd which does not have any rim at all…

To me that is fairly easy but for someone centering could be nightmare. So if you are used to centering ring than better stick to that method and 26mm pill mod.

It all depends what is easier for you guys:

- to modd or not to modd a pill? You don’t want to modd it? Not one single thing on the pill? Than reflector drill through modd and 16mm mcpcb. Centering without centering ring? Can you do it? Challenge :slight_smile:

- you want to modd a pill for larger 26mm mcpcb? It will be hard without a lathe or any other appropriate hand tool… A lot of work and fiddling with file or rasp and then final centering of 26mm mcpcb… Can you do it? Challenge :slight_smile: Centering? Easy… Just thin centering ring and you are good to go…

  • There are other methods like Jerommel and Djozz one… I would really like to see other unique modds

Edit:

Artic Alumina MRsDNF… Permanent and quite expensive thermal glue compound thinly applied and hard pressed. After curing it is concrete solid. It can only be removed with heat gun and chisel after that.

Modded a Fandyfire SP02 with dedomed XPL V6 1A. This is not the same light as in this thread, but I thought it was appropriate because it’s the same style and has the same reflector.

A little back-story: I was looking for this style light (single 18650, large-ish reflector) before Mitko found the supwildfire, and had bought the Fandyfire. My C8-to-fresnel lens thrower conversion turned out really well, so I converted the SP02 to a fresnel lens thrower (with precollimator lens), shown below. I made a PVC tube extender to hold the 62mm diameter lens and modified the pill to increase the distance between LED and lens to accomodate the long focal length of the lens. With a dedomed XPG2 I got around 320Kcd. This was less than I was expecting/hoping for with the 60mm active diameter of the lens; I think this fresnel lens was just not great. Then, when I was taking beamshots for my 7xC8 high output thrower I decided the beam of my SP02 fresnel light was just too narrow, so I decided to convert it back to its original reflector.

This was made difficult, however, by my prior modifications; I destroyed the original pill (this pill was not great anyway) and I removed the lip in the bezel that holds the lens. So to do the mod I made a new pill from aluminum. To make a lip on the bezel I put JB weld all around the bezel ID where the lip was, then machined a lip out of the JB weld on a lathe. It worked pretty well.

I used a 20mm noctigon MCPCB, and to get around the focus issue with this reflector I made flat and thin contact extenders using some copper tape I had. This worked to flatten the area around the reflector and it could sit close to the MCPCB for good focus. I then covered the contacts with tough adhesive plastic gaskets from mtnelectronics. This reflector has a 10mm opening. XM sized centering rings that come with C8s have an OD of right around 10mm. I filed down the thickness so it didn’t obstruct the LED then glued it down to the MCPCB/gasket.

So, with the dedomed XPL V6 1A and a fully charged 30Q, I measured 243Kcd at 6m at around 20s.

Very interesting fresnel lens mod there… I never seen anything like that. Is die projection clear like in a glass or acrylic lenses or it has more color aberrations around hotspot? 320 kcd is not bad at all. But it ain’t zoomie… It is fixed aspherical light in that mod?
I am really spoiled by zoomies lately(50 mm ones) and I know more than ever that with them I reached my flashlight use sweet spot and my modded supwildfires just confirmed to me once again that none reflector light in a world can’t replace me good modded zoomie.
BTW Supwildfire looks better than Fandyfire imho and it is a lot cheaper. But they are for sure old school/best school single 18650 lights.

Mine only does 246.000cd but it’s always a pleasure to use it and compare to my nitecore P30

Thanks to all BLF members for all the advice in this post to build the light

That is very nice and new batch of XP-G2 S4 2B has only 3,6A current draw with fet driver so battery will last longer(it is single 18650 light at all). So it is not everything black when it comes to this emitter and this setup(fet+single 18650).
I would rather have that new s42b at 3,6A draw than XP-L at 5,5A draw cause my battery will last longer and I will enjoy turbo mode at least 10-15minutes longer.

But if there is some kind of 17mm buck driver that could run new S42B at 4,5A than there probably would not be any performance difference in reflector light comparing to his older s42b brother. In aspheric is different story cause it has dirtier/greener die projection.

The die projection is clear. These fresnel lenses I used are quality (not cheap) lenses from edmund optics. The one I used in my C8 conversion resulted in 177Kcd with old style dedomed XPG2 (with precollimator lens) without any lens in front protecting the fresnel, 166Kcd with AR flat lens added. I was quite pleased with this, so I got the similar fresnel lens in a bigger size for the SP02 mod. The larger size fresnel lens only came in quite a long focal length, so even with precollimator lens I couldn’t get the light collection efficiency very high, resulting in small beam size. With old style dedomed XPG2 I got 350Kcd without lens protecting the front of the fresnel. With UCLp lens in front I got around 320Kcd. Just not as high lux as a quality glass or acrylic lens of the same size. It was not a bad light; partly I just got a renewed like of reflector lights after making my 7xC8 light so I wanted to switch the SP02 back to a reflector. See some beamshots here.

Finaly, something good enough from Manker….actualy its the only good manker product so far, at least from my point of view

Those are make exacly for that host, it seems that Manker knew! ROFL…plus they are quite thick too, like 2.7mm

Found them localy, the local deler branded them as Japan Manker 28mm PCB :smiley:

Good find, these boards are at Banggood too, but the thickness is said to be 16mm: Manker 28mm copper mcpcb xpl xpe xpg direct thermal path circuit board Sale - Banggood.com sold out-arrival notice-arrival notice

$3.65, cheaper than the Maxtoch board.

Ok,I got the Uni-T luxmeter in and did some testing on it. I compared it to my Mobilux DIN class A luxmeter which is about the best you can get in portable luxmeters, it has a very good optical filter.

The most expensive part of a good luxmeter is the optical filter in front of the sensor that makes sure that the relative sensitivities for all wavelengths are correct, following the standard defined luminosity curve. And this luxmeter being cheap, its filter does not do miracles, no surprises here. The longer wavelengths towards red do pretty ok, but like all other cheap luxmeters that I tested (see my sigline for tests on luxmeters) it over-reads the blues, up to 8.6 times too much for 470nm.

That said, as normally white light sources are measured instead of single colour light, the error is not nearly as bad. The calibration of my copy is not far from the Mobilux meter, and for sources from warm white to good quality cool white, readings from the Mobilux relative to the Uni-T meter varied but were within 15% of each other. An old very cool XR-E reads 23% too high on the Uni-T meter though.

This very cheap luxmeter seems pretty useful for flashlight lux-measurements, but maybe not so good for ambient light measurements (see below).

Test results :

I tested a number of different led light sources, measurements were from hotspots made by reflector flashlights, except the XR-E which was in a recoil thrower and the XM-L Color which was in an aspheric lens flashlight.
From left to right is the light source, by which factor the Uni-T luxmeter reads different from the Mobilux meter, and that same difference expressed in percentages.

Dedomed cool XP-E2, 0.95, –5%
3000K 90CRI XM-L, 0.90, –10%
Cool white XM-L2 1.03, +3%
5000K XM-L2 (Nitecore P12) 0.98, –2%
Very cool old-school XR-E 1.23, +23%
Royal blue XP-E2 470nm 4.00, +300%
XM-L Color red die 625nm 1.07, +7%
XM-L Color green die 532nm 0.93, –7%
XM-L Color blue die 450nm 8.66, +766%
_

Overcast daylight is measuring different too, the Uni-T measures 27% more. That could be due to the large fraction of 400-500nm light in cool white daylight (the Uni-T may even pick up some UV, although the plastic of the dome should absorb almost all of that), but there could be other reasons too, like different sensitivities to light that comes in at an angle (mind that throw measurements are always done with light hitting the sensor dome at 90 degrees, excluding one of the potential sources of error that luxmeters have)

Good info djozz. I’d suggest that this is worth its own thread.

Very good info Djozz… Thank you very much Sir!

BTW I am still waiting for mine uni-t meter and I probably ordered even before you :person_facepalming:

If I got you right it will probably under read de domed XP-E2 and XP-G2 but for only 5% ?

And the most important if you say that it is good for flashlight lux measuring than it should be good. Looking forward for mine and I will report new measurement results for my modded supfires.