I modded one of these today:
It was $12.22
Nice light for the price. No pill, like Convoy C8. It’s a tad smaller than a C8.
The reflector is seemingly the same size parabola, only shorter and thus a smaller diameter.
I like the simple looks of this thing.
It had a horrible driver with blinky modes and next mode memory…
But i spent HOURS on this thing, and it still looks the same.
So i put a small Omten in the plastic switch housing,
Bypassed the spring too.
Different switch boot, and it can tail stand properly now.
LD25 FET CC driver, 3 Amperes, 3 modes. The low is a bit low, but i like this no BS driver.
Soldered a copper ring on it to make it 20mm diameter. Had to make that ring from a ‘heat spreader’. (You know, those square 20 x 20 mm things).
Spring solder pad is a bit small, so i had to cut off some of the wide end of a tall spring to get the right size.
I bypassed it too, with a coiled silicone wire.
But, the driver cavity is 21 or 22 mm, so i added another ring, cut from a key ring, to have it work out well.
So the retainer ring didn’t tighten flush anymore, so i had to mill the battery tube front end out quite a bit to give it room.
KD 20mm copper DTP XP LED board in stead of the 28mm (?) thick aluminium XM board.
The board was glued in place with white silicone like stuff. Had to heat up the head to get it out.
The cold white XM-L2 seems genuine, but looks like first batches, with clearly visible grid of dots. It could be a fake, i don’t know.
But i put a fresh Samsung LH351D from Led4power in it now. Nice LED. :+1:
Fixed the LED board with 2 tiny screws, after flattening the shelf in the head.
Had to drill 2 tiny holes for those, plus an extra hole for the LED wires (now opposed to eachother in stead of next to eachother).
And then it worked, so i could do some focussing and ‘corona management’ by trying some centring gaskets.
Finally found one that shrouds the LED by just the right amount.
Tightening the bezel, light no worky… :person_facepalming:
Yeah, short circuited the LED wires with the reflector…
Didn’t expect that…
Re-soldered the LED wires flatter and further away from the centre, filed a little off the bottom edge or the reflector.
Re-assembled the head, and FINALLY it’s done.
Yeah, nothing really exciting, just a simple C8 sized (a tad smaller) “10 Watt 1000 lumen” flashlight, but with a nice new 90CRI LED in it.
You can tell the die is not small, because it has quite a large hotspot.
Very little tint shift. :+1:
Nice “go to” light in all.
But MUCH more work than i anticipated, so i had to write this long post without pics…