7 minutes gets the SP36 burning hot but it may not kill itself yet. Just try it out and tell us. As I said, once you have the light in your hands, get the manual and try everything from own experience, you may even stick to Narsil because it is a great UI. And no, there is no ultimate fail-safe feature on this light, if you want timer stepdown at 7 minutes, it will step down at 7 minutes period, if you want a thermally induced stepdown you will have to set it that way. Btw 3 minutes I found is a sensible stepdown moment if the batteriescare full.
Or I guess I could just set it to 5minutes… anyways can’t wait for it to be here. Been waiting for Sofirn to ship it. It hasn’t been shipped yet. Hmm. The UI will need time getting used to. But that’s fine , it’s worth it. The features are so awesome!! . Also I think the manual/cheat sheet included should be small enough for me to slip it inside the battery holder haha . Oh also. Do you and others enable the standby led or not? I mean led like that should last like forever haha. But I’m just worried about the battery drain. It should be cool and good looking tho haha.
Just make sure the batteries are married and have the positive end up, and everything should be fine.
… and by “married” I mean all cells of the same type purchased at the same time, at the same voltage, with the same number of charge/discharge cycles in their history. Basically, treat them as if they are one indivisible battery instead of three separate cells.
As for firmware, be sure to use and explore the stock firmware thoroughly first before deciding whether to switch. It’s one of the best available, and changing it may not be worth the effort.
Yeah I bought 3 same exact batteries from the same seller. It should be close enough. But I guess I should charge all of em first then go put it in. I hope my protected batteries with 6.7A limit each works fine hahaha.
I’d just check the voltage with a DMM first. If they’re really close, they should be fine to go into the light together, and then the light can charge them as one. It shouldn’t be necessary to open up the light again unless you decide to take the driver out.
As long as the cells are married, that generally just doesn’t happen. The majority of all li-ion cells in the world are used in married configurations… like in the battery pack for power tools, or the battery pack for a notebook computer, or the battery pack for an electric car. That’s the type of use they’re designed for. Most of the time, the cells age at the same rate… and when they don’t, it still typically doesn’t cause problems, especially in a parallel config like the SP36 uses.
No offense but do you think it's reasonable to remove the PCB from those cells just to improve the situation a little bit? You still won't be able to run the SP36 at high performance. How about buying 3 good Samsung 30Q or Sony VTC6 for less than 20 bucks? I'm sure you won't regret it.
All I have is old 18650B's, well, because they are an old cell, but even new ones should not perform well in this light, add the protection circuit and it gets worse. I'd guess ~4K lumens, maybe less. Actually that's the good thing - using low capability cells in a light like less produces what you want - less amps, the driver adapts to the resistance of the cells. There's not a straight 1:1 correlation for amps to lumens. Reducing amps from 18A to 12A won't be a 33% drop in lumens, but less, maybe 25-30%. The higher the amps the less efficient these LED's become.
My math and guess may be off a bit here. Looks like djozz measured 4900 lumens, so ~4K may be close.
You could also add resistance by using thinner and/or longer LED wires.
Now I’m starting to wonder if I need to buy myself some 30Q. Will it work just fine? The flat one? I’ve searched everywhere and I can’t find the pin top here. If I use 30Q it should be able to go to max lumens right?