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¦
The emitter board is said to be aluminium and heat transfer to the leds' thermal pad is thus also crippled. It would be wise to start measuring tailcap currents with less than fully charged batteries and work your way up from there to observe current ramp up as cell voltage is increased.
As it is, lower discharge cells may work better in this torch.
Just clean all remaining solder with copper wire after removing led, and some 1000 grit sandpaper will clean underneath led remains with just slight moving without any pressure. Applying good flux and quality solder will solve the problem for goodā¦
I tried today several times and there is always at least one led not working good.
All of them are working now, but 2 are on only about 50% brightness.
Not gonna bother with it anymore.
I have asked Sofin for replacement MCPCB or I will somehow put 3 DTP boards in with XP-L HI.
Sorry to hear that,hope you will end up with best solution. I have xpl-hi on the way, hopefully next week I will have a chance to test out that driver since Sofirn claims 4.5Amp and 1300+ lumens.
I will do a short review also
But if badly mis-matched, the lowest Vf one will take the majority current.
Or badly flowed onto a poor MCPCB, the one with the weakest thermal path will overheat soonest.
If one turns blue, it is getting far far too hot, and will never be quite the same again. DTP copper MCPCB is essential at these current levels, standard aluminium one hopeless, we learned this here years ago. It seems Sofirn have some catching up to do.
Yes I know the Vf of any given led doesn't changes because of parallel arrangement, Tom Tom. Leds in parallel will, however, share the load current, each one its own piece of the cake and thus their Vf only raises up to the corresponding shared current value (just ā in this case for well matched emitters), which of course is going to be a lower value than that of most more poweful single emitters at the full current.
PCB have big mass 30mmx1,5 and most obviously havenāt been heated properly resulting bad joints. At 6 Amp each led is taking 2 Amp which is not too much trouble for XP-G3 but results are more than badā¦
If I get my version, I will make some makro-shots from the side of the LEDs (If I donāt forget thatā¦) to see if they are sitting properly on the board.
2 Amps per LED really shouldnāt be a problem for the XP-G3 even on aluminium.
This C8 Host gives you many possibilities for 5 or 7 LEDs with TIR Lenses. Would love one of those.
I am right now a bit disappointed with my ThorFire TA13 (aka Sofirn SF30), the zoom mechanism isn't working smoothly and even gets stuck, it may have to do with me having to submerge the head a couple fingers in white spirit to unscrew the bezel for modding, though heck, that was weeks ago. Small rubber bits are coming out of the head, these for sure should be the inner o-rings getting @#$%. Grrr, is this OEM doing their research right?
Please donāt keep on mentioning Thorfire. These are Sofirn. And it seems not great. They have gone their own way, seemingly without understanding first principles.
Whereas Thorfire are (IME) absolutely solid. Every one. Unless you know differently ? PS: dipping the head in white spirit is hardly a fair test, not at all surprised that you damaged some things trying that.