What did you mod today?

:+1:

The MBI HF was among the first custom direct drive lights, these from Japan and running on custom made high discharge Li-ion cells. I was very into the MBI products when The-Guy-With-No-Name was first getting started, have several HF’s, a Torpedo and an aspheric head for a Ti HF. They’re very compact and tweak all the output possible from a small cell.

As the story goes, the inventor worked for a large Japanese company that dis-allowed the employees to have a public face, hence, the-guy-with-no-name. :wink: His packaging is incredible, especially with the Torpedo, really way over the top…

Stuck a Quad-5D XPL HI into my grey D4 last night.

It’s bright, but something doesn’t seem quite right. The 5D emitters that came with my cyan D4 and Titanium D4 are both considerably brighter on turbo mode and heat up considerably faster. I suspect my grey is outputting about 1000 lumens less on a fresh VTC5A. Not sure what’s causing the loss of output, but I don’t think it’s the emitters as I had the same issue with a previous set of XPL HI emitters in my grey.

ArmyTek Wizard Pro XM-L2

Nichia E21A 6500K R9080 & 5000K R9080

Next mod on the right……

That’s a sweet mod. Good job!

could be just the VF. As soon as bat Voltage under load falls below VF you will lose output.

Hi,

First I tried it on my regular 6x Tail boards with conventional 6 Balance resistors and a 1kOhm Bleeder
Main Problem was that with low battery voltage the higher voltage LEds (Blue, White, pink, ice blue) get dimmer tan the low voltage ones (red, yellow, green)

I came up to enhance this idea with a voltage regulator, but had to do some steps to make it work

first get the voltage and resistor value for each LED at the same brightness

Then I made some calculation to get fixed current draw versions

It is also possible to use this with side switch lights like Convoy L6, as I can get the parasitic drain for the 18kOhm bleeder down to 0.4mA when the tail board has 0.15mA for the LEDs

Now the first 4 Prototypes
I did quite some measurements and tests to even out the brighteness of them
Firt L6/L2 prototypes are build and successfully tested on my bench, modding the lights will follow

One tme i skipped the very current hungry Emerald green for a warm white

The tail board itself uses a voltage regulator so the brightness is constant down to 3V cell voltage and can be fitted with 1S or 2S voltage regulator
The 2S Voltage regulator has a 0.1mA higher drain

I haver also ordered fitting 3x3mm trimmers so that the brightness of the board can be adjusted for 2V and 2.5V LEds in 2 groups
On the other hand I can also build em with a current draw from 0.15-1mA with the balance resistors without trimmers

The rainbow LED boards have one drawback which are the inefficient Emerald green and yellow LEDs,
so their brightness is lower than green or white LEDs at the same current

Convoy M1 with Luxeon MZ 3V 5700K 90CRI led on mosDTP powered by 12Amp LD-B4:

Ceiling lumen show around 2200lm LED lumens which matches Koef3 test. Tint is very unusual because of combination of high CRI and hight CCT. Beam uniformity is best I've seen, just pure white light without color deviations. It looks like there is small donut hole in center of beam, but it's not very noticeable,in any case much less annoying than CREE XHP50.2 purple spot and greeny/yellow corona.

Test at 100mA:

That looks really good. So you have to fiddle a bit with the center piece to make it fit, then this led will work very well in any flashlight with a decent OP-reflector. :slight_smile:

Are you planning to sell the led as well? (MZ90CRI 5700K)

Gasket is stock rotated XM-L, it works good enough, maybe focus point is not perfect, but actual amount of throw is impressive for Convoy M1 with op reflector, reason for that is lumen output and domeless design of course.

I was trying to get T bin of LMZ7-QW50 ,lumen output should be 30% higher, but I'm not sure if it's available anymore.

Very nice build led4power!

There is any reason to use washers for the screws?

Btw, your pic reminds me of builds way way back:

20182009**

That convoy host has unusually large diameter of MCPCB space,23-34mm, washers help to center MCPCB.

Another couple of DQG's today.

DQG Hobi ti Nichia 219C, magnetic forward clicky tail switch. Can work by tail switch or twisty, starts on low or high mode.

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DQG Hobi ti SST-40, QTC/ direct drive. From 0-200lm variable then 1300lm DD.

Immaculate and beautiful work again CRX, not completely sure what happened in every picture but those are some nice flashlights!

My mod today is not that lot of work but it was a special led in a special light.

I had this Olight M10 Maverick (EDC-size with 16340 battery) in my to-mod box for a year now, from a GB clearance sale, and I was looking for a host to check out one of the Nichia E21A 6500K R9080 leds that I bought from Clemence. The about 1A constant that this light is driven at on max, should be great for this led on my non-DTP 119-board. The tricky part was the reflowing, it took a while to get the led centered and there is a bit of flux-residu on the side of the phosfor, but on the bright side the board fitted snugly in the flashlight so that centering did not depend on the center piece. I still used a XP-centerpiece (not doing much centering because the hole is too large), that I sanded really thin, to seat the reflecor at the correct focus and insulate it from the solder pads.
Not perfectly centered.

But the beam looks really good: if you look for it a slight bit of brown in the center of the hotspot, not too much tint shift over the beam and in this host this led is quite throwy even.

The output is pretty good: a steady 265 lumen (the stock XM-L2 gives 350lm according to the manual).
The trees are at 25 meter. Don’t mind the tint in this picture, it is much nicer than it seems here.

So the mod was very succesful, and I hope that the dirty phosfor layer holds up over time.

But what about the goal of this mod, what does 6500K R9080 look like?: in short, amazingly good! On a white wall you see nothing special: a well balanced cold white tint, a well-chosen Cree led could look like that. But once you start illuminating things this is completely different: great colour contrast, red is very red and blue is very blue etc., and everything shows the correct colour including natural stuff like food, wood and skin. I checked with a Convoy S9 with 6500K XM-L2, the E21A sw65 R9080 blows it completely away in light quality. If you like cold white tints (I don’t, really :stuck_out_tongue: ) and care about accurate colours, these leds are little gems!

Nice, so what’s the max these fella’s are happy at?

About 2A is the sweetspot for good output, past 3A the output goes down.

Thanks, might have to try them.

Just like you, this 6500K E21A have made me like CW again. Nice host Jos.
Note: clean your LED in a hot IPA bath and brush it with smooth toothbrush, it will look like new again.

- Clemence

some mention CW give you eye strain when using CW at night, so even if these are HCRI at 9080 could this still be the case, or would it be easier on the eyes with the colour rendition, or something else?.
thanks.