What did you mod today?

I’ve purchased last year copper version of Astrolux C8. It was deep in the drawer until yesterday. I’ve swapped standard BLF Bistro driver and XP-L HI to some more fancy components.

Took L4P 9A driver and Luxeon MZ 3000K bought here and put things together. The whole set creates nice WARM Flashlight. Copper is kind of warm in touch (silky and smooth thread movement). True - heavier than the aluminium, but so much nicer.
Surprisingly Luxeon MZ (4 panel LED) and SMO went together very nicely this time. I like Simon’s new 3030 9mm hole gaskets. They get widened easily and allow to sit reflector deeper which results in more focused beam. In case of MZ it gave not round hotspot but “+” shaped, very unique looking with a functionality of 5050 wide hotspot.

Some pictures below, the housing of copper C8 is eyes pure happiness just by itself :money_mouth_face: Enjoy.

Very nice!

Some sliced LH351Ds to replace the 2700K and the yucky 6500K SST-20s in a tint ramping Sofirn IF25 :

For reference : SST20 JA3 2700K on the left, LH351D 4000K on the right.

Neutral tint at the extremes and slightly rosy in the middle :

That’s awesome! So to be clear you replaced the sst20s with sliced 5000k and sliced 2700k? Or was it 5700K/2700K?

Either way the tint/cct range is awesome

Thanks, I really like the tint ramping feature, I wish there was some better hosts/driver though, it would be great in something like a D4V2, or maybe a fireflies E07 or E12, with E27A for a large CCT range.

Yes it’s 5000K+2700K, I didn’t have any 5700K at the time, with 5700K or even 6000K (if the tint is good enough) it would have been better, estimation with sliced 5700K :

Crossing the –0.0050 duv mark in the middle.

Modded Atom AL Mule w sw45 to Aspheric lens, for a more collected beam.

Nice aspheric

thank you for the encouragement :slight_smile:

I dont like mules, they throw light sideways too much
puts light in my eyes when tailstanding…

all three lights are on, only the mule glares at the camera:

I have an aspheric I use in the workshop all the time, and a mule I like only for its short physical length and low moonlight mode.

Where did you find the aspheric lens?

I’d like to add one to an old EagTac T25C2 :sunglasses:

the aspheric came from Kaidomain

18mm Optical Glass LED Lamp Lens

I originally thought I would try it on an AA Tool, but quickly discovered that the reflector places the LED too far from the lens. The aspheric lens only works up close to the LED.

Ah. Thanks for the insight!

Good, straight file works almost as precision ground flat stone - removes protrusions from the surface and leaves it flat. When the surface is already flat, it just slides back and forth without material removal.
Using sandpaper rolled around such a straight file can give some visible improvements in material removal rate.

Nice mod jon_slider. :slight_smile:

I am looking for a new tester for my flashlight and hope that he will contact me at next second.

thank you
I see you posted a lot of links and info also
very helpful

Modded few weeks ago but i’m still waiting for Yaijamei optic to show up.

Warrior Mini with 351D 5000K

I have used alu 1mm mcpcb for test but final build will be with CU board sanded down to 1mm thickness due to turbo Amps

What’s the best way to sand down a CU board in thickness evenly?

This comes up often but I almost think it’s easier to source a larger 1mm thick CU board and sand down the diameter instead. I thought the smaller Convoy boards were 1mm but according to their store only the 5050 footprint one is 16*1.0mm

I guess I should not disregard kiriba-ru as if I didn’t see his suggestion about using sandpaper wrapped file. I guess my question is then how to keep it even if that’s the best way. Rotate 1/8 or 1/4 turn for every few passes?

Yeah, rotate every pass and even then it won’t be even :(

Only good thermal paste helps using this method or if the host is copper or brass, soldering directly to the shelf.

Parallelism or flatness? Flatness can be achieved but parallelism is hard with hand tools. I’ve done it to a noctigon before using wd40 and 80/120/300/800 sandpaper. I double-sided tape in a few spots to secure the paper to a piece of thick glass, and soldered a copper rivet (misc parts bin) to the thermal pad to get a grip on it, and about 45 minutes later I had reduced it to about 1mm and it was pretty darn flat. Due to the heat buildup, I actually drilled a blind hole in a thick dowel rod and used that as an insulator. This was years ago so no pics sorry