A collegue of mine yesterday showed up with a golden oldie, an EastwardYJ J06. Brought memories back from my DX-forum days 7 years ago. He got it from a friend, it stopped working and if I could fix it. I asked if it is was ok to pimp it a bit,that was ok, but in that case his friend would get another flashlight and the pimped one would be his.
This light is still built like a tank, heavy brass pill and such, silky smooth threads, but it has a huge design flaw: upon closing the head and bezel (those actions are coupled, just like KDās K2 host), the ledboard will rotate and shear the ledwires, it almost costed me a good LG battery when that happened twice before I finally caught what was going on. It was probably why the light failed in the first place because the driver spring was toast when I received the light.
So the mods were:
*bypassing the 0.5 Ohm current limiting resistor on the simple FET-based direct driver (East92-style). High-prettyhigh-strobe is good enough for him and a BLF-A6 driver would already be too complicated.
*replaced the XM-L with a LuxeonV on a 20mm KD DTP board.
*tapped M2 screw holes in the pill to fix the ledboard with two screws
*ream and flatten to size a plastic centerpiece to fit the Luxeon V led and reflector hole.
*bypass the springs
Now the beam is better (the stock light even had no center piece at all), the tint is better (matter of taste), the light is safe, and the output tripled to 1650 lumen @ 30 seconds.
As I noticed with my other Luxeon V builds: this led is rocksteady on output, hardly any temperature sag at all can be observed.
Changed dead XP-G3 on aluminium MCPCB with XP-L HI V3 3C on copper DTP MCPCB.
First time I reflowed more than 1 LED on 1 board. :innocent:
I donāt have anything good enough to heat mcpcb this size to right temperature, so I had to use electric stove and laser thermometer to get it right. :person_facepalming:
This is just flux marks, I cleaned them later but forgot to take a picture.
Moon
Low
Dust is on outside of glass, didnāt see it until nowā¦
I finally repaired the switch cover of my DQG Tiny 26650 (third gen., with 7 leds).
In order to reflow new leds (3500K 90CRI 219Cās) by heating the complete head with a blowtorch (the ledboard is glued) a few months ago I removed the driver and switch cover but was never been able to pry out the retaining ring of the switch cover, so it remained loose and was not waterproof. Now I finally pried the retaining ring out and properly mounted the switch cover back into place.
Since I was focussing on this light anyway, I did a current measurement on low and did a runtime test. Will34 in his review measured 6mA in low, which on a 5000mAh Liitokala battery should give more than a month runtime.
However, I measured over 100mA (with 3.5 lm output) and indeed it depleted the Liitokala in 3 days. Has anyone else checked the low setting of their DQG 26650?
Iām a bit disappointed about it: apart from a nice efficient output a high setting, what is very attractive about a 7-led 26650 non-PWM light is extreme efficiency at the low modes and thus extreme runtime. To discover that my BLF-A6 (12mA at a 4 lumen mode) does a 6 times better job at that being quite a bit smaller and lightweight with a smaller battery is a bummerā¦
Yeah, thatās strange since it has been measured with low current earlier. Perhaps DQQ used some wrong electronic component later without noticing this or our drivers are damaged. If I recall correctly I tried a resistor mod with this light which I removed later. And I replaced the switch. Will have a closer look at the driver if I find the time.
Finally got the TA driver from Lexel working with my Astrolux S42. It was quite tricky to get everything apart and put the new parts together, but itās 100% fuctional.
After getting it working, I decided to reflow XP-L HI v3 3c to replace the 219c. Recharging also worksā¦the only thing not working is the power LED which i did not want anyways. Drawing over 1Ģ¶3Ģ¶AĢ¶ 14.5A with a full VTC6 and 16.8A with VTC5A at the tail with the new setup with Nasil firmware.
My S42 is sitting on the desk waiting for arrival of a replacement optic (pins broke early on). I wonāt be doing a reflow though the 219Cās are cooler than Iād like but still hi-CRI.
I will also be doing a Lexel driver upgrade to provide a much needed UI improvement, canāt wait.
I pushed the driver out from the topā¦poking thu the lead hole. Then desolder the brass supports and all the wires and put it back together. Lexel helped me with the steps when I had issues. I also disconnected the old MCU to get rid of the breathing mode.
It was my first time upgrading a driver with charging so it was tricky for me. Doing it again shouldnāt take too long lol.