HOLY CRAP… Another favorite light got hot after shorting and smells of burned plastic right out of the blue… I had a scary incident last month with the Imalent DX80 nearly exploding in my hands, and now this FW3A emitted burning smell and stopped working after just falling off a 20 inch high night table…
I picked it up and noticed it had turned on on its own and began ramping through its stepped modes to turbo, and could not turn it off with thew switch! i quickly unscrewed the head to revel a smell of burning similar to what i experienced in the DX80 failure and an extremely hot head section. so i got up and threaddded it back together as normal, but it did not turn on at first, but when i took the head off again and put it back on it turned on instantly and began to ram up to its turbo mode and could not turn it off with the switch…
so i got out of bed, went to my desk to inspect it, and found what appeared to be a burn spot on the switch MCPCB, along with the smell of burned plastic all to reminiscent to the scary moment my DX80 went into melt down.
below is the photo of the spot on the board that don’t look normal:
i know the 30Q was in correctly as i used it earlier a hour ago to take the dog out to pee before bed, then suddenly when it fell off the night table it did this…
Here is the video after i got out of bed to show what happened to this FW3A. I only had this light for a couple weeks and it did this… Its becoming hard to feel safe anymore around flashlights after experiencing to major failures of this kind with burned components and over heating due to a short…
Wow….that’s awful and downright scary! I keep a fully charged battery in mine even though I never use it but I’m going to take it out tonight before bed. Hopefully you can do some more analysis and figure out exactly what happened.
I used to keep batteries in most of my 18650 flashlights but removed them from all but the my Q8’s, the FW3A and a couple of Convoy S2’s that are manually locked out. Think I’m going to also remove the ones in my Q8’s since I only use their switches as a night light.
Thanks for posting this and glad that you caught the problem before anything worse happened.
I have no idea what happened. Am i just bad-luck with high-powered lights shorting out on me? I love this FW3A light, and began using it as my EDC because of its great design and the awesome Toykeeper’s perfect Andruil firmware, but when it fell from my ed-side night table and began to turn on & ramp to turbo mode on its own was an eye-opener… then i unscrewed the head in a hurry to turn it off, (as the switch did not shut it off) it kind of woke me up in a hurry, because it reminded me of my recent Imalent DX80 incident. seriously, i must have bad luck with high-powered flashlights… :person_facepalming: is there a hidden design mechanical fault in the light? or the switch design that can short after an impact?
Just a couple of unfortunate ocurances I think for you. The good thing was that you were around and able to remove the batteries before things got worse. I wonder if anyone had done drop tests on the light, but even if done it may not cause the issue you had.
Time for me to go and remove some batteries before bed.
I feel like a guinea pig lately, with great lights randomly going into nuclear-mode & failing when i go to bed… i fear one night, a flashlight will go bad and burn me to death in my sleep…
Does the use of glow discs, glow powders or tapes in the emitter/lens cavity affect the beam tint of the actual light? Also, do tritium tubes in the optics affect the beam tint?
Aux lights even placed close to the main emitters cut off when the main emitters are engaged, I have 6 lights with these and they do not seem to affect the beam tint. I don’t have any of the initially questioned color enhancement options, that is why I am asking. Thanks!
Looks like the thinnest area of the switch trace burnt. I’d guess the switch connection shorted with b+ (?) Such that you had the full short current going through that tiny trace. That might explain the fact it was ramping on its own. I could well be wrong though, I haven’t really looked into the details of how it all works.
Its possible. i had a closer look this morning with a magnifying glass and it looks like that trace is now melted & stuck to the spring.
EDIT-UPDATE: ok after closer inspection, there is no doubt the small trace had melted to the tail spring, why it happened after a small fall off the night table is a mystery.
Probably hit the floor tail first with the impact causing the spring to pierce the mask, switch on, ramp up then the trace acted like a fuse with the current overload. Interesting.
That was my first thought as well. Surely the energy would not travel both directions along that trace. It seems only half the trace should be burnt, probably the outer half from the spring. I suspect there was a short in the inner tube to the outer tube which caused a lot of amperage to flow all the way across that little trace. The fact that the urnt trace got stuck to the spring seems almost like and after effect than it is a cause. IDK, what do you guys think?
To me it looks like high current flowed through the inner tube when it normally would only see very low current.
Neal responded quickly and sending a replacement fortunately. What i will do however on the replacement is remove the spring, and resolder it rotated a little, so that the end of the bottom spring creates a open gap over that trace to prevent the spring from breaking the coating and shorting to that trace if that is what happened then it hit the floor, (which is what probably happened as CRX mentioned, the impact of landing tail cap down probably caused the short. its an easy fix to prevent it from happening in the future, and will show a photo of the mod/fix when i receive it.
So, is this a general design flaw of the light? Is it likely to happen with a drop that hits tail-first? Or is this a case where that light had a manufacturing flaw, and it’s not likely to happen in other lights?
I think its a matter of everyone checking the tail cap board spring, to see if theirs is soldered in the position where the spring is touching that trace or of its positioned with the spring gap over the trace. (the one i had the spring was soldered with its bottom edge directly against that small trace that crosses under it, and the spring end-gap was to the right of the trace.
… But we will just trust & hope that scenario WILL NOT happen. 
. :+1:
