Mine looked like this when I turned it on first time :
I donāt think the XP-G3 likes the heat, the MCPCB isnāt DTP.
XP-L HD/HI works fine :
With XP-L HI V2 4B it pulls 12.3 A on a VTC6 on high, it does get very hot before the 3 min step down, I have been using it for walking the dog the last two evenings drained two VTC6 batteries so far no problems with XP-L HI
Yes I re-flowed the emitters on the stock MCPCB myself, the XP-G3 has a low Vf so they pull a lot of amps, if the just used XP-G2 instead it would be fine.
I sent Sofirn a message on Aliexpress trying explain that the XP-G3 is the wrong emitter for the C8F, itās of course fine if you use a low drain battery, but high drain battery and bypassed springs is not going to end well.
If using high drain cells, you may try lowering the cell voltage. You could, for example, start at 3.7V with a 30Q and measure current flow. Maybe the overall Vf off 3 XP-G3 emitters in parallel is a bit low, this way there's a very good chance the emitters will survive by limiting the potential current avalanche.
Turning blue means catastrophic levels of current being pushed through the chip.
I had a ā3V-22Vā drop-in that I wanted to test to make sure it could handle even only 2 cells, so put in 2 18350s. Got really blue and really dim. Didnāt have it that way for more than 1-2sec tops, pulled the plug. 1 cell back in, the bugger survived.
1 cell?? Dunno how a trip could go blue from only 1 cell like that, even if just crowbarred right across the LEDs.
Unless they separated from the mcpcb and were just floating? Could make electrical contact w/o much thermal contact. That might cook āem.
It was on no more than a second after turning blue but no help. I donāt understand how would they get so hot that fast. I was using it max 2 minutes before they died but it wasnāt constant on as I was playing with modes.
Interesting is moon didnāt work at all (before it died), leds were off in that mode.
Itās before my time here, but I believe OL did pretty much only DD lights: LED and Li cell and switch, thatās the whole circuit. Donāt think they could cook so fast unless there was some serious thermal upset.
Turning blue means that solder under led is bad and melting at low temperatures. Try to reflow same xpg3 with better solder and flux, worked for me couple times even with DTP boards and XHP70ā¦