Anyone's ThruNite Ti2's not work on AAA Eneloops?........

I’m drinking tequila because I figured I wasn’t getting enough cactus in my diet.

HAHAHAHA!!!

Great one!

Btw if anyone cares I’ll try to explain a perhaps subtle mechanical nuance about watt I’ve said above tomorrow.

I still do not understand how the spring is the issue… but there are a couple of differences…

I took the silver spring out of my Ti3 and put it in the i3e.

I suspect the Ti2 and Ti3 use the same silver spring.

The i3e works fine with the silver spring from the Ti3, and also fine with the gold spring the i3e came with. This suggests to me, that the spring is not the problem… but then… I cannot deny all your reports that cutting the spring solved the problem, without chipping any corners off the driver components.

fwiw, the silver spring is Not fully concentric, the bottom wind sits on top of another, creating a 2 wire thickness when fully compressed.

The silver spring is also stiffer, it uses thicker wire… (and the silver spring is also shorter, but I dont think that is relevant)

otoh, the gold spring compresses fully concentrically, to a single wire thickness.

and it is easier to compress.

I do not know if the thickness of one extra wire, is the cause of the problem with the silver spring in a Ti2, it is not a problem with the Olight i3e. However, cutting off part of the bottom of the Silver spring, would eliminate the overlapping wire. That suggests that there is a logical reason for why the arow55 fix works to solve a possible issue with the body tube not reaching the pill. But the arow55 spring cut does not address the component that gets chipped because it sits closer to the brass button on the Ti2, than on the i3e…

(An update on ThruNite’s response to my issues and referencing this thread which they are now monitoring. This is now elevated to engineering. They’re not gonna like what they’ll find. :open_mouth: )

Regarding the spring wire not being truly concentric on the silver I think you’re spot-on. This would help explain why cutting off the lower coils made a difference too.

Since we know the chip interference is also part of the contact problem there’s another little wrinkle here………

If and when the ‘F’ chip is even just slightly ‘chipped’ off at its closest to the brass button corner the batt’s positive anode is now effectively ‘cocked’ to one side of the brass button yet it still makes contact. This slight cocking at the brass button end translates accordingly to the batt negative end due to the non-parallel distance to gap law, where the gap increases accordingly. Soooooo…………we have two things going on here. At the batt negative it’s now not quite pressing vertically concentric to the stock spring. This causes the spring to cock as well. Now we have binding and friction and that would explain why the stock spring doesn’t give enuff to also allow the negative driver ring and the tube negative to connect.

When the ‘F’ chip corner in my one unit example above was essentially completely sliced off at its base the positive batt anode made full flat contact with the brass button and consequently concentric vertical compression occurred and the stock spring was now able to allow clear non-binding travel for the two negatives points to connect. This was the mechanical ‘nuance’ I briefly mention to Arow above.

If it is true that the positive on the battery is not making flush contact with the button on the driver, then your cocked theory makes sense

in fact, even without the positive post being cocked
the silver spring is prone to being pushed sideways instead of straight down

in my compression test of the silver spring it was difficult to compress without the spring getting cocked sideways… for a couple of reasons, one is that the bottom coil is stacking under the coil above it, creating a cocked base of the spring. The other reason is that the spring is so stiff, the top of it wants to move sideways instead of down…

so yes, I do think the spring is part of the issue, and I do think cutting a bottom coil makes sense

anyway, for the price of the light, and my consulting fees to solve the problem… I think were over budget… lol!

“……so yes, I do think the spring is part of the issue, and I do think cutting a bottom coil makes sense

anyway, for the price of the light, and my consulting fees to solve the problem… I think were over budget… lol!”

Yeah and cutting off the bottom coil part and using it instead makes more sense than using the narrower top part purely from the fact that it falls right out of the tube everytime ya change the batt. :laughing:

PS. ThruNite should hire you. :laughing: :open_mouth: :+1: :beer:

good point about fallout

I was thinking the cut should be where the bottom wire is crossing under the second coil:

my thinking is that the goal is to prevent spring wires stacking on top of each other, while also maintaining enough girth to stay stuck in the hole…

with due respect
I think the idea that the tail of the battery gets cocked by the F Chip is a non Starter… I am unable to cause any binding when using the base of a toothbrush to push the battery sideways down into the tube… its just as easy, or hard, as when I push straight down.

I remain convinced that the F Chip is too close to the button, and any spring machinations are just superstitious oblations. Meanwhile the real fix is that the head of the eneloop creates room for itself, after repeated insertions past the offending F Chip.

Hmmmm. Ok we’ll just havta agree to disagree. Second para we agree. :laughing: :beer:

PS. Pushing a toothbrush flat ‘sideways’ by hand against the batt is not the same as cocking the batt positive anode housed in a rigid threaded head and then chip cornered trapped as well. All yer doing is shifting vertical concentricity pressure sorta evenly over to one side of the tube.

I agree the toothbrush pushes in a different way than grabbing the positive post in a pair of pliers…

but the way I think about it, the body tube does not have enough lateral clearance to allow any significant deviation of the battery tube alignment… the moment arm is too long to permit significant displacement

all that to say… speculation runs rampant… given the dearth of evidence

Im just happy for you not to need to return your Ti2 lights
the results speak for themselves
even if I dont understand the reason… it works… so… enjoy! :beer:

Got mine today, and 9 of 10 had the screwup. To make it easier on others, I want to post the easiest method of modifying them to work. Use a long wood screw of sufficient length and diamater to screw into the top of the spring and pull out the spring. Cut about 3/4 of the bottom round off the spring with diagonal wire cutters. With the screw still in the top of the spring,start it down the battery tube turning backwards until started. Hold the upper rounds of the spring with needle nose pliers to remove the screw. Then use the battery to push in the spring the rest of the way. I have a theory as to what the issue is, but that does not matter. The first 2 took me 30 minutes, the last 7 about a minute each. Figuring out how to remove the spring and reinsert it was what took so long on the first 2. All ten work perfect now. Thanks for alerting me to the fix, and I hope the breakdown in a means of removing, and reinserting the spring helps.

congrats on your arow55 Spring Fix
glad you figured out ways to get the springs in and out of the tubes with a screw and pliers

I use these:

either one works,
the forceps hold better during extraction

they are inexpensive options from amazon

the tweezers are the essential tool for extracting the pill of a Ti3, for LED swaps. They also work for extracting the pill of the Ti2…

My forceps and tweezers were too wide to reach the spring through that tiny battery tube, but the long wood screw worked really well. Without the Arow55 and the other posts, I would have had no clue as to what to do to fix them though. Who first came up with that fix is brilliant. I would have likely just filed them in the circular file bin if not for reading this first. It just would not have been worth the hassle to return them. Many who buy them are not on this forum, so I feel for them. That issue might be why these were so inexpensive. I think Thrunite had to be aware of the problem.

Someone over in ThruNite’s in-house QA is prolly gonna get chewed out here soon. No matter who supplied the driver.

This just shows again how important QA is. That’s why they get paid relative big bucks.

maybe, or

someone is getting to keep their job, after selling off a bunch of problem lights
caused by a chabuduo decision to use the silver springs instead of the gold ones

Watta coinkydink. 9 outta 10 of mine were also fubared. :laughing: :open_mouth:

Btw Sarge, wattya think about that tan version? Sexy ain’t it? :heart_eyes:

I don’t know about sexy, but I do like both colors. This was a very good deal, once we repaired them. Now if Acebeam will just put their K75 on half price sale…I will be a happy camper.

Ok quick update.

ThruNite has refunded the $29.99 purchase amount not including however the $5.95 in shipping. No return of product required. No detailed explanation other than basically stating refund given due to light not turning on when battery inserted.

Good service. You should spend that $30 with them.

They have too many fine products for me not to do that. :laughing: :+1: :beer:

I got a Thrunite Ti2 free with a promotion when buying a TS2 survival lantern and so what the heck. But it did not work with a battery as has been mentioned. I took the head off and saw how close the center positive post on the driver board was to IC’s near by and wondered if I was having a clearance problem with the positive post of the battery. So I set my power supply to 1.40v (kind of in the vicinity of an AAA battery) and it worked, but my power supply is limited to 1 amp. I thought I had a short on the board as that was such a high current for an AAA battery (ie: short run time). So I moved to a different higher power supply and found it pulled 1.4 amps. Wowser.

Looking on the board I saw a tiny 0603 size resistor with R10 marking on it. OK, so that’s a 0.1 ohm resistor. I un-soldered it, attached some leads so that I could experiment with different value resistors. (All the small value resistors I have are big through hole power resistors). Here is what I measured:

0603 resistors aren’t something I have kicking around so I think with the next Mouser or Digikey order I’m going to purchase the 1.0 ohm value. That seems to be a good compromise for me. I’d rather have the light last 6 hours on a 750mAh battery rather than 45 minutes (or less) with the 0.1 ohm current senses resistor. 25 to 30 lumens is kind of a medium mode on lots of AAA lights that have 3 modes.
Battery Junction was selling these at $5 for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and I said, what the heck and bought two more, now that I know what to do with them :-).

All along, I may have been thinking that my problem was the center post on the driver board didn’t protrude high enough above the components and so I put some extra solder on it. So after my new resistors come in and I put it back together and if it still doesn’t work with a battery, then at least I know its a clearance issue with the battery and needing to possibly shorten the spring. I don’t want to have to do anything with the spring, but at least I know what to do if it won’t turn on when I know darn well the driver board works.