Awesome results Tom! Both lights are impressive but who would have thought that the HD 2010 could be such a beast? Wow!
The HD 2010 results are kinda blowing me away, but think I nailed it with tight-fitting a trimmed 20mm star in there, and sanding star and top of pill surfaces all the way to 2500 grit. The HD2010 pill is far from stock, lots of copper added inside, plus a small brass pill, but I didn't touch the pill from the pre-mod. Maybe the SinkPAD though gets some real advantage from this. Oh, also got a UCL/p lens in there, also pre-mod.
Oh, also, I left the SinkPAD indent on the bottom as-is, and used Arctic MX-2 grease rather than epoxy I had before. Filled the indent with grease though.
Just hope others can re-produce these results, hoping I'm not crazy or got it all wrong somehow 
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Gotta run - Super bowl party at my daughter and future son-in-laws...
where’d you get your sandpaper assortment? I need to resupply my higher grits and its been a long time since I shopped around
Got the fine stuff from Amazon, direct. Ordered 2 assorted packs, 1000-2500 wet/dry:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005JPGTNI/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00
Having seen the impact that lapping can have on CPU cooling the results with the 2010 seem to show what can be achieved with elbow grease. I can see now why people were getting excited about these.
Why is the XM-L U3 100 lumens brighter then the XM-L2 U2 even though the U2 has slightly higher amperage?
@30sec?
A bit useless IMHO.
What are the results on 5-10minutes?
Something useable. Unless You plan to use your light under 1 minute?
Tom - where did u find a ucl for the hd2010?
nice, thanks, I also grabbed two of the 320-800 assorted. That should be enough to do the 30 boards sitting here 
It’s not. The XM-L2 U2 is 387 lumens brighter than the XM-L U3. Sure makes my stock HD 2010 look sick. Lol. It ended up 770 lumens otf after 30 seconds and throws about 53k
you are correct, i misread the results
however, why does the post mod hd2010 have 1360 lumen @ 4.09A and the 7G9 have 1264 lumen at 4.2A?
What is a good soldering paste to mount led’s on a copper star? I have destroyed 1 star so far with no luck. :bigsmile:
I’m assuming those are tail current measurements, not current at the emitter, so assuming the measurements are accurate - driver efficiency, and the acceptable deviation of emitter performance (7% range for each bin?)
emitter current, good point, perhaps someone should test emitter current and voltage drops, a table of this would make a great sticky thread
flashlightlens.com - it's a little big, think it's thicker. You got usually 1mm to play with in width. Pretty sure I can't fully screw down the bezel as far as it used to, but its over the o-ring.
Bort - as far as the HD2010 doing better in lumens then the 7G9, amps helps but it's not the only thing that matters. We are talking minor differences here, and that HD2010 reflector does well for putting a lot of light out - good in throw, while the 7G9 targets throw more - tighter hot spot. So is my lightbox perfect? No, no chance, but could the HD2010 be a little better at putting out lumens in it's setup than the 7G9, certainly could be. There's also signifcant differences in batteries, LED emitter from one to another, etc. For example a binned 1C can be all over the place, more cool or more neutral sample to sample.
One difference is certainly the battery configuration - HD2010 running a 26650 (good one - KK) while the 7G9 uses 3 18650's in parallel - tested with Panasonic 2900's unprotected. Batteries make a big difference in measurements I've taken. You put 10 mins of runtime on a battery, brightness suffers quite a bit, even with regulated drivers.
great results, particularly the reduced output drop with the sinkpads. Possible lower Vf might help too, but everything else (host etc) should be equal. Although output after 5min or longer would be interesting, you’ll then be looking at the thermal properties of the host/ dropin etc, not the LED star.
Well, I used a paste that was marked to do aluminum, but it would do other metals as well - bit expensive because of it supposedly for soldering aluminum but I didn't have much luck with it, so, used the same stuff for the LED mounts - worked well.
Got it here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0058ED0LE/ref=pe_175190_21431760_3p_M3T1_ST1_dp_1
Where did u get the sinkpads?