I finally modded my IF25! Well, twice really.
I started off by just replacing the two 6500K SST-20s with 5000K LH351D emitters. And…well, I can see why mixing emitters can be a bad idea. On their own, the NW LH351Ds and the WW SST-20s looked great. But when ramping through the tint mixing, you ended up with stuff like this (the photos don’t really show just how bad it looks):
Basically, the throwier SST-20 dominated the hotspot, while the LH351D was more prominent in the spill.
So the center of the beam was warm white, while the edges were neutral white. Like CREE tint shift, but DIY!
So I pulled the light apart again, and this time put in some new 2700K LH351Ds that I got in the mail. And they fit under the optic!
Though if you look closely…you’ll see that one of the 5000K emitters looks really scratched-up on the side. That’s probably due to my carelessness - somewhere during my constant disassembly/reassembly of the light, I had probably misaligned the optic, and then forced it down by screwing the bezel in place. Eventually it settled into alignment, but not before messing up part of the LED’s dome. At the lowest mode, you can see how light filtering out of that scratched part is made bluish:
And it’s even apparent after slapping on DC-fix:
On the plus side, my glow-in-the-dark tape around the bezel looks pretty cool!
And even without DC-fix, the beam looks more even now:
However, while I couldn’t photograph it, I could see why Sofirn might’ve gone with SST-20 instead of LH351D in this light - because the LH351D is floodier, the “petals” from the optic are much more prominent at the edges, making for a weirdly-shaped beam. And some artifacts appeared in the hotspot too, so this optic is probably just an ill fit for the LH351D. Anyway, that’s why I threw on some DC-fix:
This was a lot of fun! And my first multi-emitter reflow. Thanks for all the tips people gave me along the way!
I probably won’t swap out that messed-up emitter for now, since the beam looks fine and I’m rather tired of opening this light up.
Its imperfect nature just makes it more uniquely mine, haha!