As mentioned. The driver is now dead. Ill write the story. My brother will be referd to as The Doctor.
I did a high temperature with 3 batteries, and the light died after 8 min. The circuit board also had a new bad/funny smell.
I inspected the light and found out the the black negative wire got loose from the board. (probably due to all my fiddling and that stock wires are really thin)
Once the wire was upgraded to something larger the light could not switch modes. It was locked in low… Something was wrong… I checked my work several times but could not find something wrong with the wire I had replaced or anywhere else…
Away to the hospital:
On closer inspection this caused a short: (cropped picture, erea is not within depth of field since this was a random picture when I was not aware of the short curcuit)
The Doctor reported that a short-circuit killed the “largest black important thingy” (my words, not The Doctors).
Now… The Doctor who always needs to fix thing found some stuff for it and it was properly alive in no time with the ability to change modes…
The new “big black thingy”, now Frankenstein size with headsink was tested…
It was not very efficient and output on high was not more like medium… Input voltage was quite high though…
Considering the driver was now pretty useless, and I did not want the light with “low” output only or replace the fried part. It was time for some extreme over the top experimenting and testing… DIRECT DRIVE!
3 leds in series and 3 batteries! To limit current a little bit, a couple of parts on the driver curcuit was used… In the “test bench” with quite long wires it measured 5,3A. It was probably 6+ amps…
Light got assembled and it was BRIGHT!” Went out on the porch and tried it… WOOW!.. and after 5 sec one led got fried.
I had a feeling that could happen… Would hoped for 30+ seconds though…
Looking back:
The only minor complain about the light was that the leds did not have thermal compound everywhere beneath them. It was under the emitter, but not under the whole star. I suspected that when I had looked at it earlier. All the three leds are now out off the pill, and the one who got fried got of quite easy compared to the others…
(old picture before hospital visit)
To sum it up: This was the most fun Ive had with a light. In generall, not just in terms of modding. I say succsess despite the failure!
This light have been through a lot of modifying! And I have improved a lot on soldering skills and gotten some more knowledge in this project…
Future plans:
Days before killing one led I had already placed an order on several leds. This light will get 3 new T6 3C XM-Ls wired in series with thicker wires. The last two stock leds (T6 cool white) will get into project lights… Currently one have found its way into a Sipik SK68.
As for driver, before I bought the light I had been looking at some stuff from intl-outdoor.
Yesterday, I placed an order for this. So 3,5A to each led coming up in the futre. Ill use the stock 26mm driver board in comination with the new driver… Due to Chinese new year it will probably take up to 5 weeks before my lights is back in business. No rush… All I know is, the future will be bright!