BLF AA-Y4E - Third time lucky?

I hope so anyway. I've just had to repair my BLF Mr. Lite for the third time.

Firstly, like a lot of lights I've got, I needed to solder bits of TCW onto the driver board to make a reliable connection to the body, blobs of solder just don't cut it, as everyone knows.

Next, it was the tailcap assembly, same problem.

Then yesterday, it stopped working at all, and I isolated the problem to the driver board. Pulled it out, and there was an inductor only soldered on one end, it had only ever been just touching the pad! Anyway, I fixed that up, put it back together, and it's working fine now - we'll see for how much longer!

I know these lights are only cheap, but sometimes I think that I'd rather just buy the parts, and put them together myself, it would be a lot quicker to end up with a reliable product.

Cheers

Yeah , some times they should be sold in kit form ...

Excuse my ignorance but what is a TCW?

Google isnt very helpful:

Unless you have to wrestle the driver while soldering?!?

My guess, Teflon Coated Wire - but this is just a guess.

I have two of these lights, one the normal J4, and one the BLF version. Both have given me no problems but I did find that yesterday my J4 stopped working after being exposed to -30c for almost 2 hours. I was not using it for the 2 hours, but attempted to turn it on to see how it worked after sitting in that temperature. It gave only a few little flickers and that was it. I thought it was toast. There was frost on the lens and I couldn't hold it in my bare hands without frost bite. Extreme conditions for a light to work but my Romisen RC-T6 had functioned perfectly the entire 2 hours in that temperature. I was running a trustfire 14500 battery in the J4, so I thought the battery would handle cold temperature. Apparently I was wrong, but the light worked fine after warming up.

Anyways, sorry for the off topic story!

Probably the battery was not fit at -30... Scary cold tho.

Mizjif when you said freezing weather i thought of this video,, http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjMyMDc0NDMy.html

As i type this i notice you bought the z1 so maybe the link came from you origionally.

Back on topic i found my BLF light to be troublesome , flickering pains in my butt ..on one of them when I opened it up the Emitter fell of the heatsink board .I don't know if it was just sitting in thermal paste?? the reflector seemed to be jammed against the emitter and was an on again off again flickering beast ..

The question of the eastward vs. the Mr. lite as the blf light is an easy one for me ..I have 2 blf's and 1 eastward ...2 to many lights. I wanna like the blf ... I just don;t .

Tinned copper wire. I used 20SWG (About 0.9mm).

Cheers

Oh, thanks. You put that between the driver and the pill to fill the gap when soldering the negative to the pill?

No, it is soldered to the back of the driver board, so that the body contacts it, rather than screwing down onto a blob of solder, which always compresses and loses contact. The pill is aluminium in these lights, so there's no chance of soldering to that!

Cheers

I just had the second problem with my BLF AA y4E - first one was continuity with the head and put in a copper washer. 2 weeks later and the switch quit - same fix and I'm hoping that is the last of the continuity issues.

Really appreciate you guys leading the way so I know what to do to fix these problems.

Sam