Q8 modding

I'm using 1/8" drill bit to drill out the driver holes a little bigger. It's working well so far, but also replacing the flatheads with button tops.

I did find definite glue substance at the screw holes on the spring/tail PCB on one Q8. Why on one Q8, and nothing on others - no idea. Cleaned it off with 600 GRIT - that seemed to work well, in thin strips, folded, using the thumb nail to get in there. They do a not job of keeping the aluminum surface clear of anodizing, then put a layer of glue on it - I don't get it. Also had one badly stripped out tail PCB screw. Had to use a cutting wheel on the rotary to cut a slot in the head, then slowly worked it out with a flat-bladed screwdriver.

Yep, that’s what I saw on mine — except one of the screws was in line with the middle and the contact mark skipped that part of the ground ring, like the PCB was pulled slightly down along the radius where the screw happened to be.

Bother!

Jtm94, zooming in on yours I see contact from 2:45 thru 11:00 (clockdial reference), continuous.

Tom Tom, It does run out at the very edge,
A.)the battery tube is only 0.057” thick
B.) The driver board leaves a small gap between outter perimeter and head body. You can site straight down the threads and see the gap.

Is the wear on that ground ring as bad as it looks in the picture? It looks like it already went through the copper layer in places.

And what happened to the + ring? Did it shrink along the way to make room for the screws? I don’t remember the early prototypes (without brass) wearing on the very edge of the ring like that. It’s probably not an actual problem like the ground ring but it looks really stupid.

Fixed it,

Don’t think so, I scratched a small area pretty hard with a drill bit, the brass is thicker than it looks, I believe. Did not pierce thru.

I wasn’t hallucinating. :+1:
I swear I saw another post with glue on the tail PCB screws. Paged all the way back to my Q8 arrival post, scanned it over and no joy finding it. 45min I quit. I am glad you found glue for my own sanity.

Thanks. It might be dirt from the tube which makes it look worse than it is. Time will tell anyway.

Yea, I thought you were nuts, but...

Actually I've seen the same thing on just one screw hole on a couple other Q8's, but more mildly applied, but now that I saw a bad case, it's clearly used on the other Q8's, but not as much. Between that and the sand :FACEPALM: .

Now I did see a bump on 2 lights I modded with replacement screws on driver and tail PCB, solder on the spring side of the tail screw hole rings, cleaning up of the PCB to battery tube contact, and applying NO-OX-ID to the contacts. the bump was only about 200 lumens though, at 30 secs.

Adding the spring bypasses now should be a bigger bump.

More like just around 4. One side of my driver is very wore and the exact opposite side it is making “some” slight contact. I’ve stared at the board until my eyes hurt and there is in no way continuous contact all the way around. I think I may take some sandpaper flat on a glass surface then smooth up the face of the battery tube.

Also Tom E:
I made a post about glue on my tail pcb screws as well. It wasn’t very hard, more like sticky/gummy. I just took a shop rag with some rubbing alcohol and cleaned up all of the surfaces. I need to open the flashlight head hole in my approximation shoebox so I can see if any of these changes are boosting my brightness or if it was all for nought. You seemed to have really bad luck with your screws, I was very cautious removing mine due to your warnings, but they all are in good shape. Someone must have been a little too heavy-handed when screwing yours down.

So what do you do to get the tail PCB out?
Does it unscrew?
Push out from inside the battery tube?
Shake really hard?

I’m still waiting for mine (package in MI but fedex changed expected delivery from 9/21 to 9/25) but based on the ground contact issue I plan to do what I did with my Chimera - form a piece of 12 awg copper wire into a ring to fit into the space between the threads and driver, pound it with a hammer to thin and widen it, sand the flattened surfaces, and use it as a retainer/contact ring between the driver and battery tube. The end of the tube may require a bit of sanding to position the o-ring correctly and adjust alignment of the flats on the tube with the head as desired but it worked nicely on my Chimera. Good contact all the way around and enough output from the xhp70.2 on the wall 12 ft away in a room lit by a 60w equivalent ceiling light to make me squint when I touch the fwd clickie tailswitch.

Been wanting to get NO-OX-ID but never think bout till I could use it. Buddy uses it in his Auto repair for bad connections. It eats up the green. But he said its pricey.
I did also use an M2.5 tap to clean out the tail holes and get glue and anodize out. I did find the sand powder in the driver screw holes. The 1/8th in drill works well for the driver holes and the screws aren’t bottomed out before tight on that size hole.

Thanks Jtm94, now I recall the user name. Can I have my 45min back?

I’m Not Crazy!

I’m Not Crazy!

I’m Not Crazy!

Really… I’m not.

Unscrew the cap off the back end, 4 Phillips screws and it falls out.

Has anyone with pcb design experience considered designing a replacement switch board? It might be the quickest fix. Option of 2 or 4 emitters would be nice and would help reduce apparent uneven output and allow color blending or additional switch lighting features like battery state indicator with a supporting driver/firmware. I’ll be ordering I ordered a 10 color 200 piece lot of 0603 emitters so I’ll have a few to spare.

I ordered a couple of multi color packs a couple years ago. I've been doing these indicator LED's for years now in flashlights. If you want to independently control multiple LED's, that requires some extra hardware - we are I/O pin limited, each LED would take an I/O pin, unless you can add some sort of multiplexer perhaps.

My tailcap and driver screws were screwed on very tightly.
They came off easily after I touched the heads of the screws for about a minute with the tip of a very hot soldering iron.
I also found stuff on my tailcap screw threads which was removed with a fine wire brush.
Since I do not have a tap I reinserted the screws and removed them.
More stuff came out and was cleaned.

I stuck a piece of tyre inner tube to the base of the light with silicone rubber to protect it when tail standing on rough surfaces. e.g when changing tyres.
I used silicone because the rubber can be removed without damaging the Q8.

Updated the Q8 thread OP with:

TWEAK

On some Q8 lights there can be a sandblasting powder residue under the tailpcb and in the screwholes for the tail pcb mounting screws.

On some Q8 lights there can be some sort of glue residue in the screwholes for the tail pcb mounting screws.

No worries it is not conductive, but that does mean there can be bump in output achieved when removing and cleaning it. The screws are very tight, USE A MATCHING SCREWDRIVER AND RUBBER BAND BETWEEN SCREW AND SCREWDRIVER TO AVOID STRIPPING!

Thorfire will clean better during the rest of the production.

CHECK

Answer. yes some lube is very likely required, please add your favorite flavor. Good point about tube, please use file and/or sandpaper to smoothen things out if too rough for your liking.

Again, some screws are clearly stripped before you even touch them. I've encountered a couple screws stripped in both directions, more stripped only in the CW direction. Overall though, it seems more are good than bad. I have a large sample size (9 pieces) to review.

This is the condition they were in as installed, all 4 on the right, left one is good for reference:

This is the glue remnants:

After cleaned up:

…Even the ‘good’ one on the left looks bad to me… No wonder they get stripped - there does not seem to be much surface area for the screw driver head to act properly?

That’s part of the problem. It looks like a phillips that is a little wallowed out. Reports are that it’s actually a JIS.