OK, I’ll defer to TK’s advice hereafter. It’s the conservative approach, no question about that.
I suppose an overheated lamp could vaporize the gel and redeposit it in bad places, on a high powered light.
Tho’ from experience, I’ve got a handful of Arc AAAs on which I’ve long ago cleaned up contact surfaces with [a tiny dab of] Nyogel and cured flickering due to dirty threads.
Note the black powder that accumulates on aluminum threads — it’s aluminum oxide, an insulator, that forms and is scraped off any time the threads are worked.
That’s what you want to remove. Wipe with a clean cloth if you don’t have the recommended lubricant to pick the stuff up.
Aluminum itelf reacts extremely fast with oxygen in the air, so produces a fresh oxide layer immediately when the thread contact moves.
I have an FW3A that turns off around mid-high while ramping up. The problem is intermittent. I can fix it by unscrewing the head and screwing it on again. My thought is a dry solder joint cutting off an FET channel, rather than a contact issue. What do you think?
Try loosening the tailcap retaining ring slightly.
I found that on one of my FW3As I got a bad connection if I fully tightened the tailcap retaining ring. I think the ring caused the board with the switch to not sit quite flat and not get a good connection with the inner tube.
Yes; I did that for a bit, when I was having connection problems, and found it helped. At some point, I jammed the retaining ring in the tailcap and can’t budge it now. This switching off when ramping up is a different matter. I am wondering if it may cut off when the battery falls below a certain voltage; it worked fine last night between 4.0 and 4.1.
Mine at first did the same thing when ramping up. Tightening the tail cap and head always stopped it although I could not perceive them turning. Sounds like the inner tube is very touchy. For whatever reason mine has not done it in awhile.
It doesn’t sound related to the inner tube at all. The inner tube is only responsible for controlling the switch. When you have a complete loss of power as the amperage draw increases it points to something else. Perhaps really high resistance through the body connections or battery connections.
Middle age man, you’re using a flat top battery and not a button top, right? You by try cleaning the threads and battery connections.
Jason, I defer to your experience. Somehow mine stopped acting up after tightening the ends. Maybe the connection to the driver with the outer tube was bad? It stopped doing it totally by itself knock on wood.
I just want to say that maybe Teflon shouldn’t be referred to as food-grade. While it is arguably stable on pots and pans (until scratched), it shouldn’t be consumed.
Anyways, yes, electrical contacts should get dielectric grease - be they bulb sockets, flashlight threads, or whatever. A lot of times “Nyogel” is used as a generic recommendation; as mentioned in this thread, there are many types, and 760G is what you want for your flashlights.
I am using a flat top 30Q. I have cleaned the contacts and threads; the threads were a bit dirty. I am also noticing that when ramping up and down, there is a gap in brightness, i.e. there is a sudden jump in brightness from medium low to medium high and vice-versa, rather than a smooth transition.
Wow, so in addition to turning off (occasionally) while ramping up, it also has a sudden jump in brightness?
Man, I would see about getting a replacement. Sounds like there is an issue with the driver. There are three channels and it’s designed to transition through all 3 smoothly. If it’s not transmitting the pwm signal for channel two it will ramp up through channel one and then stay at that brightness level until channel two goes 100% and then you might see the jump in brightness. That would be a pretty big jump though. What you’re describing sounds very strange like there’s a problem in the MCU.
What does it do when you double-click to go to Turbo? Does it sometimes go to Turbo and sometimes turn off?
Turbo works fine. The problem is intermittent, so it was working fine all yesterday and last night. This morning it was switching off consistently when ramping - around the mid-level brightness. Switching it to turbo and off a few times just now has reset it to normal, save for the jump in brightness, which is not that big. I am wondering if it might be a switch problem.
It turning off seems highly unlikely to be related to the switch. If the switch circuit got disconnected it would simply stop ramping as if you are taking your finger off the button. If the switch circuit got shorted it would continue to ramp all the way as if you were holding down the button. If the switch circuit got disconnected and then reconnected it would jump to Turbo. I can’t think of any thing related to the switch that could make it turn off while ramping up.
The one exception being is if the switch circuit got disconnected for at least 1 second and then somehow reconnected very briefly. That would simulate you ramping up, taking your finger off the switch for a second and then doing a single click. This would turn the light off but I find the odds of all of that happening just like I described to be extremely unlikely.
Besides something wrong with the driver, I’m not thinking of too many other things that it could be. Maybe temperature related? You said going to Turbo seemed to fix it and turbo does generate a lot of heat. I’m sorry I’m not of much help.
I wonder if you can buy a new driver really cheap. Has anybody seen drivers for sale?