The BLF GT70 "Giggle Monster" is here! 7,500lumens, 1,500m throw! Group buy Closed!

Going off how hard the GT is to open, I would not worry about insufficient clamping force :wink:

Lumintop BLF GT Flashlight DIY Short Body That’s the page at BG for the shorty tube but go to Martins site and join and get the code under Lumintop and that will take off $5,
$20 is a bit steep to me and I can’t just give out the code or Martin would scalp me or worse, but that price does give me a good clue as to what an full extension tube might cost.
Kind of funny at Lumintop, the secondary Giggle code for the conversion kit didn’t seem to work so I got hold of Victor and he fixed it for me, he brought the cost down to $83 for the kit and two extra carriers,
I have no idea what the discount would be but no matter I’ve gotten a good deal from Lumintop since day one, but then after I paid up it asks if you want to go to the home page and so I did and I noticed right on their home page another code for the GT that brings the price down to $220, ha ha… wow
I guess the GB might be sort of over with if their advertising a code of their own as well, I can’t help wondering why bother with these codes, just sell the light for $220 and skip the codes, nothing is secret anymore, there’s codes everywhere.
But, out of all the codes I’ve seen TA’s code is the very best so Giggle that…!

Banggood is doing their yearly anniversary sale with crazy low prices. This will be ending very quickly, though.

So you measured 2 lights with the tube.
Then you measured both with ceiling-bounce (cb) and set the factor in cb to a value, so that cb shows the same amount of lumens as the tube?

This way you could get reliable results with cb afterwards for all other lights…
(not taking into account, that different reflector characteristics will for sure also have a large effect on the results)

Lumintop has been very good to deal with… for sure…

:+1:

Yeah, that was what I was referring to. I’ve modded a few lights (not that many compared to others, but Skyray V2, 9xT6, Solarforces, BTU, etc) and each time it is easy to desolder and solder the PCB leads when the copper PCB is on those white thermal paste. Replace that with Arctic Silver 5, and you actually struggle to solder leads to the PCB, the heat is just pulled away too fast and I have a 80W 380’C regulated soldering iron. With the fat tip you have to hold it quite some time to warm up the PCB, PCB shelf and wires.

That led me to thinking that while better thermal paste won’t give you more lumens OTF on a cold start, it might give you a higher sustained lumens OTF because the LED wouldn’t start thermal throttling, and it might even prolong LED life? If I can open my GT70, I’ll do a comparative test when I get it :slight_smile:

If I´ve to solder wires to a copper MCPCB, I try something like this:

Put the thermalpaste on the ground, put two pieces of metal (heat-resistant) on the ground and than the MCPCB on it.
So the heat isn´t pulled away too fast any longer.

After soldering you can remove the small pieces of metal and press the MCPCB down and rotate it a little bit to evenly sread the thermal paste.

Yes yes., I use a light meter app…

I’ve found my 80W Yihua 995D soldering station can’t unsolder certain mcpcb leads (30mm copper). The 995D would melt the top part of the solder blob then the whole head of the flashlight would get hotter and hotter.

Then I tried my cheap Velleman 50W and it can melt it very easily and quickly without heating up the whole head.

It’s theorized, and it seems plausible, that it’s the somewhat loose fit of the tip onto the heating element that is not allowing good heat transfer. It’s said that the genuine Hakko tips have a tighter fit to the heating element and is one if the reasons they perform so well. I’ll try to test this theory soon.

And now you know why I’m T-18 that is my go to solder tips always, Hakko solder tips are the only ones I ever use, the best IMO…

I had that same problem when using the china tips, ever since switching to the hakko tips I can solder mcpcb’s mounted to a light with good thermal paste without an issue as long as the substrate has enough thermal resistance. The clemance mcpcb’s are hard to solder no matter what for example.

I used to think my station was the issue until I also switched to hakko tips, now even my cheap $15 soldering iron works great and I find myself using it a fair amount, I keep a large tip on 1 of them and a small on the other.

Same here TA, this has to be one of the first things I discovered after joining, I have a Yihua 936 and started with some sort of knock off tips and then Richard RMM and I were chatting and I explained some issues I was having so actually it was RMM that clued me offhandedly by telling me he never has the problems I was referring to and I asked what tips he preferred and it’s the T18 series and so my thinking is if it’s good for RMM then it will be excellent for me and it’s stayed that way.
I found that the Shape B became my do everything and anything tip, and just as a thought this tip is probably the best for anyone new to soldering, I think you can hardly fail with this tip, worth looking at even if your an old hand at soldering but haven’t tried these.
Shape B and examples

I can’t get any coupons to work, tried different browsers, copy/paste and manually entering codes. :frowning:

Very strange, even typing them in manually did not work?

It just takes the price off, you have to look at the total to see the difference.

About the Hakko tips, where would be a good place to buy one single genuine tip at a decent price?

If you use amazon prime I think they have decent prices on them there. Otherwise ebay is where I got mine.

Sorry, my mistake. On my device the Determine order button wasn’t onscreen until I scrolled. There wasn’t any Enter button near the coupon field so I hit Enter and it moved to a page with only the checkout option.

No problem, I figured it was something like this.

The T-18 S3P is the one you want for the big stuff…NOT CHEAP….

https://www.amazon.com/Hakko-T18S3P-Fx-888-Station-5-2mm/dp/B00762AHTE/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=lawn-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1537309289&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=Hakko+T-18+S3

I got the D24 with the Hakko station and I liked it alot, still do… then I tried the S3,D32 and D16, but then I found this kit… with the S3 D32 D24….Amazon.com Pretty good deal and you get the 2 Conical tips for like free…