Back in Black - SST-90 4D Maglite "Shower Head" Aspheric build.

Old-Lumens, you are a great modder and willing to share your knowledge with us. I have seen your youtube videos and they are very helpful to me and I believe to anyone else, so I definitely have no doubt with your modding skill and your flashlight. It was simply out of curiosity that I asked about the lux reading, but no mean of any disrespect at all.

Maybe it’s my bad english expression that cause some misunderstanding here. Yes, it is a bada thrower exactly!

I know that. I didn’t take it badly at all. I was just saying that sometimes numbers are needed, to corroborate. I just can’t give them that’s all.

It's all good.

I got it back in today after a little rework to re-attach one of the driver leads. It now draws the full 9.3A I put it into my sphere without the lens. It starts off at around 1750 lumens. Within 60 seconds it is down to 1000 lumens. After 5 minutes it levels off at around 800 lumens. It looks like it is having trouble sloughing off 30 watts of heat. The flashlight body temp is not too bad though.

The color temperature readings are a bit low. The sensor was mounted outside the sphere, looking through the styrofoam wall. That seems to absorb some of the blue light, reducing the apparent color temp.

Looks like it'a bust, all the way around. You can send it back, if you wish and I will refund the money. I am thoroughly ashamed of it at this point. I went through the soldering twice now and still a bad solder joint? I just need to stop using drivers and limit myself to direct drive.

Justin it still draws 9.3 amps, which means there is no bad solder joint. It just has 1750 lumens, which to you might be bad but I think is alright. I think what texaspyro is trying to say is that a lot of the heat is staying inside the light rather than being delivered through the body to the outside. Because judging by the lumen outputs after 5 minutes and that the flashlight body temp is ‘not too bad’ I think it’s just the fact that it isn’t transferring heat from the LED or driver to the body well enough.

Just curious, texaspyro, what are the lux readings on this one?

don’t beat yourself up OL, you did a fantastic job. Any torch/ flashlight will struggle to dump 30W+ of heat with limited surface area. Hell, even dedicated bike lights with 2-3sq.in. of surface area per watt can’t do without 3-5mph airflow, it’s just physics that’s all. Given that it has modes, I doubt it’ll be run on full for long periods anyway, not unless he wants to get arrested for misdirecting local air traffic. Just consider Texaspyro’s testing to be an extreme case.

Funnily enough, this brought to mind a complete nutter on CPF who made a 10x XM-L light for his RC plane and then made videos of it buzzing a freight train. I wonder what the driver thought?!

No way I’m sending it back! It’s a wonderful machine and nothing to be ashamed of. The repaired driver is working just fine. A solid 9+ amps out.

I don’t think that the drop in light output is due to heat transfer from the pill to the body. The pill was only gets 5C warmer than the body. I think the issue could be Luminus’s over exaggeration of the ability of that LED to handle 9+ amps. At 9 amps, the LED package must move over 200 watts per square inch of package base (9A x 3.9 Vf / 0.17 sq/in). My 150 watt Bridgelux arrays are less than 1/5th that power density and they are not trivial to cool.

I’m going to try some forced air cooling on the pill and see what that does.

Here’s a plot of it behaving rather well on medium (2.5A / 9 watts). Note that the light output is actually increasing with the temperature! It was cranking out around 525 lumens. I wonder if a high of 5 amps might actually deliver more light than the 9 amp setting after it gets cooking for a while?

I agree that Luminus’s data sheet may be exaggerated. If you look on cpf here you can see that at 9 amps an ‘N’ binned SST-90 will pull just over 2,000 lumens. But if you look at here, from what I took from a Luminus data sheet a while back:

  • Luminus SST-90 K-bin (1620-1890 lm @ 9A)
  • Luminus SST-90 L-bin (1890-2295 lm @ 9A)
  • Luminus SST-90 M-bin (2295-2700 lm @ 9A)
  • Luminus SST-90 N-bin (2700-3240 lm @ 9A)
  • Luminus SST-90 P-bin (3240-3915 lm @ 9A)

It seems the test of the N bin was around 1000 lumens less than what it should have been. I hate to be the one to say this, but if we assume that OL somehow received an ‘L’ or ‘K’ bin LED then it’s understandable why the output was like that.
That’s just my theory though.

EDIT: This whole thing is under the assumption that there is adequate heat management. If the forced air cooling noticeably bring the output up then this whole thing just goes out the window.

The part number I received from mouser, in a sealed package, was the "N" bin. That's all I know. The heatsink is way too small for this light and I only meant it for a quick turn on wow light. It was never meant to run for more than a minute at a time. In order to cool one of these in a passive cooling environment, such as a flashlight, it would take a piece of copper/aluminum the length of about 2-D batteries, plus the area above the switch and where the switch is as well (about 200mm in length). If I had used a 6D flashlight, I would have filled the first 1/3 of the light with a heatsink, but I had a 4D and space was such an issue, that I put the drivers flat, to gain a few mm of room. I never imagined it would be used for more than a WOW light. I thought wrong... See, I'm not a flashaholic, so I don't think like one. I turned it on the first time and thought WOW, but ok, what would I ever do with it? I never ran it for more than 30 seconds at a time. You guys turn them on and immediately see how many amps you can squeeze out and for how long and make charts & graphs, LOL, I'll never understand, (I am Not putting y'all down, more power to you and good for you and the knowledge you share). Definitely, this is the second SST-90 that I have tried and failed with and this is the last SST-90 I will ever waste the time on. An SST-90 at 9 or above amps needs to be in an active cooling situation. A fan, or water cooling, if it's going to run steady for several minutes. I just wanted to make a thrower that would reach over a mile, to put all the chinese throwers to shame. That was the whole reasoning for even doing it.

Anyhow, I'm done rattling on over nothing...

Justin please don’t stop making SST-90 lights! Not until an LED comes out which surpasses it (I’m hoping XML2). Even at 1000 lumens that’s got to be brighter and throw further than any chinese thrower. Your work is great and a minor setback shouldn’t discourage you :slight_smile:

After all, you can do what a lot of people here can’t do :slight_smile:

Yep, with the circles and the arrows and the paragraphs on the back explainin’ what it’s all about :wink:

BTW, I do have a 6D Mag waiting for some fun J) Those NiMH D cells that I have are 9.5 Ah (and will put out at least 50A). That should make for some fun wowness.

What are you going to run on 50 amps?

The 540,000 lumen array that I built draws over 120 amps from a 48V supply, but has no battery.

The 180,000 lumen array draws over 40 amps. It has a backup battery made from A123 20Ah prismatic pouch cells.

And if 50 amps from a D cell won’t cut it for you, Saft makes a NiMH D-cell rated at 70 amps continuous/200 amps pulsed… but they aren’t low self discharge.

Definitely a dealbraker.

Definitely a dealbraker.

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Yep, that’s why I bought the Imedions… they don’t actually say what kind of current they are rated at. They do peg a 50A meter though. 9.5A is 1C on them, should be safe.

Wow d cells are crazy. How many will you use? And what kind of runtimes would you beeedpecting?

It uses 4 D cells. At full blast it would run the light for an hour (but, due to LED heating, the light output falls to half after three minutes). On medium it would run for 4 hours with no drop in LED output. I don’t remember the current on low… it was under an amp so call it 10-12 hours.

I still think this is one of your best mods. Would you ever do something like this again?

I would love to do one with the MT-G2 if I could figure out using two lenses. One near the led to pre-focus and then the large aspheric on top. Either that or my own version of the wavien ring. Yep, I have to try making one myself and see what all the fuss is about. I'm sure not going to pay for one, LOL.