Short Review of Sofirn SP33 v2 with XHP50.2

No step down issue. What happens is, I will turn on the light and it will only have low and medium brightness working. I turn it off and try turning it on again, and again, but only two levels initially work. I do the tricks mentioned and I get turbo again. Works normal for a while, and then repeats the no-turbo level at initial turn-on, again. Then I repeat the process of cleaning the battery or resetting tail cap, and turbo works again. Sofirn is my favorite flashlight brand at the moment, and I am attached to my SP33 V2 enough to live with its quirky characteristics if Sofirn says it is operating as designed.

Also have u tried tightening the retaining ring on the head and the tail springs?

Make sure nothing is loose, a pair of needlenose pliers should do the trick (or 2 nails held in a X with elastic like chopsticks)

The driver is glued. I just noticed something about mine I didn’t see before. The spring on the driver side is compressed. The battery always did rattle. I pulled on it with needle nosed pliers to stretch it back out. Less rattle know and maybe solved the problem . Will see.

I don’t have a Facebook account, and have no interest joining or participating on it. No offense, just not my thing, I am weird like that. I know Facebook can be a good tool for many things, but I am happy living under my rock LOL.

Mine came with a battery. The 26650 is pretty heavy and shipping may have been rough, compressing my spring. The spring seems a little light gauge. Anyway, I will let you know if it helps to stretch mine out.

I will try that, thank you. The battery only rattles a tiny bit when I shake the torch aggressively. But, all my lights do that, and some more than others.

Ok, I cautiously used needle nose pliers on the springs top and bottom. I will see if the problem goes away, but like I mentioned, it happens occasionally, so if I go a month with no issues, maybe it worked.

If the driver is glued it then u shouldnt tighten the head, there may not be holes to do so

These kind of switching issues are usually some kind of looseness … or the bat

I remember someone saying sofirn had an issue with the tail springs in some lights not being the proper length

What you can do is short the tail like fenix shows which will tell you if its a tail spring/cap issue

https://www.fenix-store.com/troubleshooting-your-flashlight/

Good video, thank you.

Any time you get it working by fiddling with the contacts tells me it’s something to do with the contacts. I would go through and clean all contact points. Both ends of battery tube, end of driver spring, edge of driver, pull out the tail spring and clean both ends, clean the tail cap outer edge plus the notch the spring fits in. Dirt, powder or just oxidation at one point can cause a small amount of extra resistance. You might have 2 or more points of extra resistance and are only cleaning some, but not all.

Also, make sure your springs are pressing tight against the battery. I push my tail cap down 1/4” before the threads engage. Then it compresses more as it threads down so I know it’s got good pressure. I don’t feel the battery sliding at all when I shake it hard up and down.

Pretty sure my compressed driver spring was the culprit. Shipping with the battery installed could have caused this.

It certainly can be a problem. Lumintops ODF30 is also a boost driver light and it’s tail spring design used a metal tab. This tab was not very springy and if the light is bumped it gets a weak contact point and you loose Turbo. A lot of folks had this issue. Bending the tab back to get tighter contact fixed it.

The Rofis MR70, also a boost driver light, had issues with not going to Turbo. It was just an issue of weak battery springs or dirty contacts. Sometimes it was the Rofis battery which was protected. Later Rofis switched to an unprotected cell and Turbo lasted much longer.

I think once boost driver lights become more common people will start understanding them better. Just like with FET lights people learned to do spring bypasses to get more lumens.

BTW, spring bypasses help on boost driver lights as well. It gives you more total, cumulative, run time on Turbo. Anything that can keep the voltage higher at the driver will help on a Boost driver light.

Too soon to be certain yet about the spring as it worked well last night but the battery just came off the charger. Getting stuck in moon and failing to cycle through levels also comes and goes. But my battery was shaking around and now it is not. Fingers crossed.

The reason is chemistry. Aluminum oxide is an insulator.
Every aluminum surface exposed to the atmosphere has a thin layer of oxide on it, that wears off with friction.
The exposed aluminum surface then oxidizes within seconds.

That’s why flashlight threads accumulate black stuff that interrupts the electrical channel until threads are cleaned.

My SP33v2 seems to have high parasitic drain - measured 3mA (~3000microAmps)

I didn’t test the parasitic drain of my SP33v2 when I first got it, since I removed its battery after I tested it before.

But lately I left a 26650 inside for maybe just a month or so, and the battery has completely drained — and I haven’t really used that SP33v2 much.

Any idea if the SP33v2 just developed parasitic drain by itself, or it has that parasitic drain already in the first place?

For comparison, I tested only around 30microAmps parasitic drain for the SP33v3.

I don’t know. There might have been something wrong with the driver from day one. Maybe the MCU is not going to sleep for some reason?

I can see it developing a drain later, especially if it was dropped. Ceramic filtering caps do have issue of shorting internally when they are physically stressed. Sometimes they seem to go bad over time for no apparent reason. A shorted cap might be more than 3mA, though.

Thanks for the explanation.

No, my SP33v2 was never dropped. So it probably just went bad over time for no apparent reason… so fixing this parasitic drain requires ordering a new SP33v2 driver?

Yeah, I can’t see it having a drain anywhere else in the light.

$10 discount code for 2 HD 26650 5000mAh batteries: [5Z8E9KX85DXD](can be used 10 times only)

Sale price: $12.99 Discount price: $2.99

1.The battery fits in SP33 and SP33V3.0

2.Codes only work for our official website www.sofirnlight.com

Link:https://sofirnlight.com/products/plb-flat-top-hd-26650-5000mah-rechargeable-battery-cells?variant=31504670818364

Just noticed this ‘upgrade’ (+500 lumen) on their new Sofirn website

Interesting. I’m guessing they boosted the driver output.