I got my Tool AA Ti today. It was an impulse buy and I never looked much into this thread or in Chibiās review, but there are too many dumb features to leave this light unmodded:
10mA parasitic drain is unworkable, drains the battery in 5 days !
golden clip is ugly, it gets my black clip from the alu one.
memory!
XP-L2
7400K
but the worst thing: it is a shelf design with the shelf therefore being titanium, the ledboard is nice copper but the heat goes nowhere after that. Iām not surprised that ledwires unsolder themselves.
So: other driver, better led, aqua switch leds at lower current, I can not fix that shelf but I will craft a new copper board that will reach the very edge to bypass that shelf (the stock board stops short of the edge).
Victor told me earlier they should be releasing an upgraded model with a copper head soon, i donāt have any details. (So i donāt know how heavy it will be Jos)
I really like the light, but indeed, the parasitic drain is too high, the tint of the XPL2 is ugly and it gets HOT
For now, i just twist the head for lockout so it wonāt drain my cell and the reflowed high CRI SST20 makes the tint so much better (and throwier)
Interesting to hear about the copper head. While I love my Tool Ti, the all-titanium head was a bonehead move.
I also swapped my LED as soon as it arrived, along with a new tailcap that is brighter, gives my realtime battery status, and only draws like 80uA. I just wish I could do something about that gold clip without stealing one from another Tool.
I like my Tool AA Ti, and I agree that it needs a better heat transfer path. But that really looks like an afterthought. Perhaps because it is? Copper or not, it looks really out of place.
Is the >5 ma coming from the lighted tail cap or something else. I havenāt checked mine, you all got me wondering if I need to check and see if my battery is dead.
Yeah, that stock tailcap is a battery hog. Keep an eye on it. Not only is it the style where the LEDs are on the switchās PCB (less efficient than a separate ring board), but the current is cranked up so it can shine through a black tailcap
I fixed that a few days after I got mine by taking off a couple resistors with some needle nose pliers. I didnāt even both heating up the solder, but I did destroy those surface mount resistors. I cannot believe Lumintop employed such a bad design/concept!
Funny how most Chinese manufacturers still donāt know the difference between brass and copper and sometimes they call it red copper or purple copper and just happens to be brass with forced patinaā¦ and itās not like they donāt work with copper, they just donāt care.
Not too enthousiastic about the looks of the ToolTi with brass piece either, the original looks better, more hard-core titanium or however you would say that. I do agree with the decision to use brass instead of copper, brass is stronger, it makes for a structurally more robust flashlight, and the thermal conductivity is plenty.
I have always had good experiences using C14500 Tellurium Copper. It machines fairly easy without gummimg up like pure copper.
Itās harder than pure copper, I think its close to brass. Depends on the alloy of brass I guess.
It machines similar to soft aluminum to me and still has good thermal conductivity. Itās still a soft metal though, just better than pure copper.