I suppose manual soldering is not something big manufactures are thinking about, so technilogies are moving to the other side. Small connectors, point welded nickel strips, tiny laser-welded pins etc.
Not sure through hole is best solutuon, most would like rather big hole (like 2mm), if hole in shelf or pill is 2.5mm it leaves just 0.25mm to sides. If you are assembling light with wires as short as possible and fixing driver first and that soldering pcb, there is no ways to look and check if there is no solder leaked through the wire hole.
P.S.
I suddenly invented perfect decision which can fix two problems - pcb rotation and solder point under reflector bootom.
PCB with two extra half-circles protruded outside. With solder pads on them (outside reflector bottom).
Cons: you will need dremel and mill two cuts.
Should be easy enough to check for shorts, just put one DMM probe on the pill/head and check for shorts by probing each LED wire solder blob.
Yeah, that’s the downside. I’m interested in a solutions that require less work. Your design is for custom MCPCBs anyway, if your going to go custom I’m still convinced that two through holes in place of two of those wire notches would be an easier solution. If people can successfully drill their own holes and solder without shorts, soldering with pre-existing holes should not be an issue. But yeah, I have to put my money where my mouth is and try drilling first.
Through isolated hole in metall core pcb is another technology.
It took many years to move from fr4 to metall core.
And several more years from metall core to DTP.
How long will take next step? Nobody knows…
Good news. I was able to convince Simon at Convoy to make a 21700 version of the S2. I asked him to make it fit Carclo quad optics so we can mod it into a quad. He is designing the host to accommodate a different quad optic with dimensions posted here. Does anyone know if this optic is compatible with Carclo quad optic? I want him to make a S2 21700 that is compatible with off the shelf quad optic and Noctigon, MTN, L4P quad mcpcb, of course with Kiriba-ru copper pills or spacers .