My Imalent DX80 caught fire, vented smoke, almost exploded (replacement head arrived)

Lucky you got the top off , albeit KFF Kentucky fried fingers.

Wow very interesting, i hope your finger heals well.
It will be very interesting to see what the cause was.
Get well soon.

Same shyt happened to my light, I was using with full charge, turned it off after 3 mins then mechanically locked it out. Turned it back on after 2 mins and poof, went up it smoke. I might have seen some fire but was so shocked, I was like WTF! and mechanically turned it off.
edited: this happened to my DX80

Was that this model that went off?

DX80

Imalent was quick to respond to to this incident, and they said they will ship a new DX80 or the head to me via DHL. ( May,12,2019)

That’s good news DBSAR… :beer:

If they do not require you to send the damaged head back to them, perhaps, if you find the time, you can open up the head and try to figure out where the fire started? Always good to know where lights can fail!

That’s good to hear. It’s better if this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

But when it does, it’s nice to know the company is standing by their product fixing it fast.

best would be if imalent could pay for shipping to have the light sent back to them, thats the best thing really since they made the light they should investigate what happend…

I doubt anyone out in the public would hear back from them what the problem was if the light is sent back. And it is interesting for the flashlight community what happened.

They seen the photos of the damage i’m guessing here, and didn’t request the head to be shipped back. All its joints are glued. once i receive the replacement, i may try to get the burnt one apart to see exactly what burned on the driver. there are many parts rattling inside now, so I’m guessing it really disintegrated inside.

I wonder….would it be possible to design flashlight’s waterproofing in a way that seals when the pressure is from the outside but fails quickly when it’s from the inside?

I’m sure it is.

One already existing example is a ‘good’ usb rubber cap (the one on FT03 looks pretty good) where outside pressure helps sit it better and inside pressure just pops it off.

Something else that comes to mind is a thin elastic membrane that sits flat outside a metal plate with holes.

Pressure from the outside will stretch the membrane inside of each small hole, not braking the membrane.
Pressure from the inside will stretch the hole area of the membrane, braking it.

What came to my mind is asymmetric o-ring groove, normal on the inside but somewhat open on the outside, so it’s easy to blow out the o-ring. Zero added cost but I’m afraid of dirt accumulation on the greased o-ring.
I haven’t heard of any BLF light exploding, ever. I hope I never will. Nevertheless I think it would be good to add safety vents in case it happens one day. However something that adds cost or reduces practicality just feels like overkill…

More thoughts:
Initial guess is that the cause of the explosion is a sloppy soldering job.
Can we trust our manufacturers to do better than Imalent in this regard? I’m afraid the answer would be “no”.
Which reinforces my thinking that it would be good to think about safety vents at the time of designing new lights.

Can we program at least some of our drivers to have overcurrent shutdown? It would protect from shorts on the output side but not those before it (right?). Still seems better than nothing. I think that the answer is “no, we can’t do such shotdown without adding cost” for most drivers. But I’m not sure…
Maybe hard shutoff on severe overheat would work? Seems to be something more portable across drivers but acting slower.

Hi,this is Ethan from Imalent, Hope you are OK.

I am ok, the small burn on my finger is healing. One of the representatives from Imalent replied to my email about the incident, and told me they would sent a replacement. I appreciate the concern and fast response to DX80 incident.

  • Den

UPDATES,May,16,2019

The replacement head arrived today for the DX80. I thank Imalent for the fast & great customer service, and quick solution & replacement of the failed light.

(I managed to get the burned head apart… it looks like the driver nearly exploded, (several of the components were blown off the driver board completely, and some of the large copper traces were melted off. My only guess here either one of the square large inductor coils shorted, or a trace close-shorted to cause some high-amp DC arching, (like a welder affect) maybe someone more experienced with circuitry could identify what happened here. (it happened when the light was cold and when turned off, and occurred as soon as i tried to turn it on.)

The big squares look like inductors.

It it would be interesting to have a picture of a "non burned" driver for comparison