What did you mod today?

sorry to hijack the thread, but im still new to modding and slowly learning.

getting super frustrated my L6 has been out of action for too long :cry: :cry:

Sounds like a direct short from + to reflector base.

Today I updated two quads I made some time ago :

Convoy M1 Quad TPAD XP-L HI 5D, Khatod optics, and a Thorfire VG-10 MosX 4040 Quad LUXEON V 4000K, Carclo 10621 optics.

Both using spacers from kiriba-ru and MTN-17DDm drivers.

Thorfire VG-10(left) Convoy M1 (right)

The Khatod optics give a much tighter beam profile, but it’s still very floody. The amp draw is 18.7A for the M1 and 23.1A for the VG-10 both on a fresh VTC5A, this makes the VG-10 the flashlight drawing I ever made, with the Emisar D4 (MosX 4040 Quad LUXEON V 4000K) a close second with 22.4A.

I think when you soldered the 18 AWG wires the solders got too high and the reflector shorted the led wires. That caused the high current and the switch spring was the weakest point. Look into the head for short signs. And make solderings flatter and put on them kapton tape.

Ive got electrical tape on the base of the reflector and the is no sign of contact?
(the black dots are from my phone camera dirt on the lens)

Is there any wires chipped under driver?

There has to be a short somewhere else, strange that it only happened when you tightened the bezel.

Did the LED board rotate & catch the + wire maybe?

Or another idea: on KD boards the wire soldering points are very close to the screws try measure short between the led plus and minus and the MCPCB screws with multimeter.

found it :cry:

positive wire cut by the star twisting when doin up the bezel

FFS!! could this mean ive wrecked the driver?

yeah, i noticed that when installing, checked and checked again to ensure there was no contact.

looks as though the MCPCB has cut the positive wire while I tightened the bezel

Driver is probably ok.

… check around the + wire joins & spring.

fingers crossed! do you think that battery is still ok?

I also found the KD board doesn’t meet the L6 screw holes and wire holes…… Frustrating to say the least!

Nice lights you got there. Got a link to the optics? And what MCPCB did you use for the Luxeon LEDs? Got a link to that one too?

No idea _ looks like it was in great shape prior to the incident though… :zipper_mouth_face:

what makes you say that? i only purchased them a month or so ago.

I mean it was putting out plenty of energy to cause that damage.
It’s more than likely fine.

I have had the same thing happen before. Unless you had the short going for some time , the driver and cell both should be OK. You may have lost a little bit of life off the cell by raising the Internal resistance slightly if anything.

If you haven’t already tested it ,you can get a more controlled result if you have a short jumper wire and just hold it against the end of the tube and the negative end of the cell and then have someone hit the side switch to see if everything is working OK before you put the tailcap on the light. This way if the light does still have a short or anything you can break the connection much quicker than trying to get the tailcap back off.

I would say the battery should be OK if its not getting hot shorting too long, the weak link is the spring and switch

2 26650 Keeppower High Drain cells shorted you look likely at up to 100 amps no wonder spring and switch quit

Those batteries have IR of like 20mOhms, maybe another 30-40mOhms on wires and spring bypass

so we got like 8V on 60mOhms

if the original DTP board does not fit the size of the new you always can drill a hole in the shelf and simply twist one of those self cutting screws in it that are often used in plastic cases if you got no thread cutters

I had the rotating star also a few times, cutting in the wires, never turned out good melting some stuff

You can check the driver if the LED- pad has a very low resistance to ground ring the short created that voltage spike and blew the AMCs, but this usually happens only if the driver had the gate of the AMCs activated

How it cutted the wire? Did you use screws to secure MCPCB? It should not spin. I noticed the hole misalignment on KD stars too and I always grind the MCPCB wire cutouts bigger to fit like this: