The whole piece drops right in, as is, in the Mag head! a perfect fit!
Some modifications are needed as the star is set up for 12V, disassembly is required. Here is the aluminum heat sink, the 3 emitter star, the lenses and the face plate. The base and its circuitry is discarded.
Here is a closeup of the star, notice that the 3 LED’s are wired in series as 12V is supplied by the original driver.
I want to run these 3 LED’s off the original 3 D cells or in other words 4.5 volts. I needed to separate the series configuration so that I can run them in parallel. What I did was drill through the traces connecting the 3 LED’s in series.
After the drilling, I checked to make sure that the traces were not shorting out to the metal star where I had drilled through. From here all I had to do is wire the 3 LED’s in parallel and to the original switch and put it back together. I did not have to modify the original MagLite in any way, only remove some parts from the switch.
This will give me 9 watts and a whiter light. Then there will be an issue with heat. The included heat sink is pretty massive, but there also has to be a drain for when it “fills up” Better thermal contact of the sink to the head will help. As of now it is not an issue.
Whats the measurements on that thing.
I bought the 4 led version and mine rattles real bad in mine.
Thought about using copper tape. But never got around to it.
That star is too big, it is 50mm. Mine is 32mm as shown in the pic. I saw that too at fasttech and would love to find that cree q5 in a 32mm star. instead I ordered 6 3W bridgelux from them. In quantity they are .66 each - cheap enough! I am looking forward to seeing how fasttech does with my order, they seem to have a very good site.
Pure flood, and warm white approx same color as an incan. Now that I know this works, I will do a cool white version. I don’t know what degree the TIR optics are, but it is floody. Output is approx 270 lumen so there is more light that the LED mag which is around 130 lumen. As I said, I will next try 3 –3W BridgeLux emitters @6000K on the star. They are only 66 cents each at fasttech in quantities of 5 or more. So my mod cost is soaring!
$2.24 + (3 x 0.66) = $4.22
Thank, this is my kind of thread. Friend gave me a 3d Maglite some years ago and I have one if those bulbs in the post. Plenty on Ebay,and I suspect that they differ?