Fulton Angle-Head Military Flashlight mods?

good form factor , sensibly driven will run for days

and they are rugged as hell with common batteries

looks like a perfect mod for those less than LEDS sitting in the drawer

Well, yes... kinda. A friend of mine has a Fulton, and wanted it converted to LED. But the thing completely lacks thermal pathways (apart from the aluminium reflector, which is surrounded by plastic and therefore no help at all). My idea would have been: find someone with a lathe, have him turn a aluminium-dropin the size of the reflector with a hole in the front for one low driven XP-G and a fitting polymer optic. But finding a 3 V driver is hard, getting the setup even remotely watertight is even harder...

So I did a cheap-ass mod that can't be considered a mod really. I just popped in one of these:

http://www.systart-webshop.de/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=19&category_id=9&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=28&lang=en

It has a LED of unknown make, very strange dome that is supposed to work with all kinds of reflectors, and comes with its own 1-9V buck/boost driver. Don't know if it's thermally regulated, i tested one of these at 4.8V (4 eneloops) and it did get quite warm... 55°C or so, but stable over 10 minutes. Light output is okay, definitely better than original, but nothing spectacular. Beam shape stays rather ugly.

Unfortunately the manufacturer is in Germany, so probably not an option for you as they don't ship overseas.

If you want I can forward you one at cost, but shipping things from Germany is rather expensive. PM me if you are interested.

Hopefully someone else has a better mod for this light, these are very cool!

EDIT: Lots and lots of typos. Stup'id figners!1

That photo brought back some memories for me! My first real flashlight, kindly provided to me by Ronald Reagan and the US Army. I loved that light.

The best move is definately the LED bulb drop-in

Here's the best for 2D lights. Its 3W, and uses a Luxeon Rebel LED.

EDIT - Ooopps......Wrong.....its the Terralux TTS-3WP than you need

I thought I would add this here for anyone who love these lights as much as I do. This one has an aluminum HS but the ones I have made after this are copper.

This anglehead I decided to add a little more ooomph, and went with a Madmax wide open plus. The LED is the XP-G r5 mounted on a 20mm board and attatched to a piece of aluminum I found at work. I drilled out the bottom and potted the MM+ in the heatsink.

You will have to excuse the cotton on the bottom of the potted MM+. I put a small amount of a cotton ball in the anglehead to check out the beam before I attatched the reflector to the LED and some stuck to the bottom:ohgeez:, the reason for this is the crappy Loctite clear epoxy, I don’t know if I got a bad batch but it was suppose to setup in 60 mintues and even after a few days it was still tacky. I will go back to the superior Devcon clear 30 minute epoxy.

The reflector is the most excellent reflector for the XP-G. It is 41 x 31 and only requires a slight trim to the inside lip of the anlehead to fit flush in the light. I epoxied the reflector to the heatsink so that it would transfer heat to the reflector and not move around at all.

IMO, this is the ultimate reflector/LED combo for the Fulton anglehead. Now on to the pictures.

Heatsink and LED

Back of heatsink

Reflector

Notice how close the reflector mates to the emitter board for more heat dissipation to the reflector.

Epoxied the reflector to the HS with the good stuff! 5 Minute Devcon clear.:party:

This shows how the reflector sits after a little trim to the mouth of the anglehead.

Next are some reflector and body photos. Excuse the ugly plastic lens, I have some glass on the way. :slight_smile:










I hope this will help guide some in modding this great light. Enjoy!

Nice!

Nice! Is there any way for the heat to escape out of the flashlight?

The Madmax wide open is only pushing 700mA to the XP-G so heat is not and issue with this light. I built this about 2 years ago and it is still kicking. This light gets a lot of use with dog walking and camping. One of my favorites and still runs off of alkalines. It it so much brighter than the stock light.

The achilles hill of the Fulton anglehead is the crappy switch. It flickers sometimes and I have not fooled around with it to find a fix, maybe one day.

Beamshots plz :D?

I will take some later when I get home. 2nd shifter here so it will be after midnight when I post them.

I will say that the deep reflector makes this light a thrower of sorts, but it does have some side spill.

Lately I have thought about building a triple anglehead with some glow around the optics. 8)

Any light as a comparison to it you would like to see? If I have it that is. :slight_smile:

Distance measurement will be fine, but if you have something with similar led inside and around the same power draw, then it would be very interesting to compare :)!

Good product…but maybe aluminum version will be better?

It would be an expensive flashlight to machine, but I would love to see it made out of metal.

I will work on some beamshots tonight as it was raining very hard last night.

Wow! I have not taken any photos since I sold my Nikon D70s. So I used my son’s crappy Samsung camera, so please excuse the lame beamshots.

I will be buying a new camera soon.

The other light that I compared the anglehead to is a SS XR-E r2. The anglehead is an XP-G r5.

XR-E

XP-G anglehead

Both lights were place on the black car on the right.

Wow, that is a tight beam!

That looks pretty nice. Good job.

It is very tight. Like I said, it’s the best reflector I have seen for an XP-G if you want throw. It transforms the Fulton from below average to awesome!

I have added a custom glow o-ring made with IV line a v10 glow powder.

Here was a safety orange anglehead that I modded and sold. This one had the copper HS. I wish Fulton had of made these in Safety orange, unfortunately this was a chinese knockoff and the quality of the switch and belt clip show as it used screws vs. rivets.

Thanks!