Sold out: $20 HD2010 & $15 Convoy C8 copper pills

It would be nice if you would make ​​c8 pill for 20 mm star

Bore led/star to fit 20mm please.

Why bore the pill for a larger star? Why not use a smaller star and let the pill do the work? Reflow the star to the pill while putting the emitter on the star, it’s all one piece, absolute best thermal path. A 16mm star easily does that with no need for that extra 2mm all the way around. My 2 cents.

Hmm… I just measured the diameter of the star placement base and I thought it would be a stretch for the C8 because its outer diameter is already pretty small, but I think it would be possible for the HD2010.

The OD of the HD2010 pill is larger and the star base diameter is already pretty big at about 18mm.

DBCstm, would there be a better thermal path to the pill if there was a greater contact area between the star and the pill?

Don't just copy the HD2010 pill. Allow it to take a 20mm star and 17mm driver, but with enough mass underneath to allow the pill to be bored out to accommodate a 20mm driver. You could ask MRsDNF for the design, then you'd have a pill that's better than what vestureofblood did with his pills, and it'd have more thermal mass too.

Another replacement pill could be for Convoy, especially if there's a pill that's used for multiple popular lights.

I’m no specialist in this stuff, but it seems to me that the heat is going to follow as direct a line as it’s allowed to. The tiny emitter base is where it’s coming from, if allowed to flow into the pill freely it will have an angle of travel much like the light that flows from the emitter, or a 125º emission angle. I’ve seen charts that indicated that to be so. Thermal imaging was used to show that heat flows into the heat sink at almost exactly the same conical pattern as the radiance of light out the front.

That is , unless it’s bottlenecked, then it has no choice but to mushroom out looking (as it were) for the way out. Given a nice copper pill, with the star soldered to it, the heat is going down before it goes out. So a larger star won’t see any real heat until the sink starts seeing saturation.

Maybe so, but some of us would still prefer to use a larger star. It's a lot easier to fit a 16mm star in a 20mm hole than the other way around. If I have the choice between a HD2010 pill that doesn't fit a 20mm star and a pill that does like the one vestureofblood made, I'd go with the one that does.

A 16mm copper star in a copper pill is exactly the same as a 20mm copper star in the same size copper pil. A flashligh doesn’t know where the star ends and the pill begins. It’s all copper.

I’d love to help but I never used a standard battery tube with a new pill. My battery tubes were made to suit longer pills. It would not be hard to measure up though.

A bigger star also helps prevent shorts with the reflector when thicker wires are used.

leaftye! The issue of the reflector on the HD2010’s shorting out on the connections is much more easily handled with the larger star. I had forgotten that I enlarged the pill in mine for a 20mm star but then, I’ve done so many things to mine it’s hard to remember just exactly where it does stand. lol

Reckon I ought to get a new one and start over. :wink:

So what’s the ETA for something like this? I’d order more if there was more lead time.

It doesn’t look like the Convoy pills isn’t practical like I was hoping for by looking at these pictures. That would have been real slick if their lights were modular.

http://imgur.com/a/BRUo8/embed

I doubt many, or any, others would be interested, but I’d like copper pills for the A8 clone and F13. I believe both these lights use the same pill.

Anyone know if the Fandyfire HD2010 pill is different to the Ultrafire HD2010?

From the picture ryansoh3 posted above, it looks like the UF takes a larger driver, or at least has a thicker wall for the driver cavity. The topside appears to be the same.

Would you love to help a fellow Aussie, & also keep Aust. Post working, by sending me up one of those copper HD2010 slugs :wink:

I’m not seeing the benefit of a copper pill.

Other than for soldering too.

Tom E measured no appreciable difference between a copper c8 pill and a brass equivalent, there’s pretty much your best and worst case scenario, I can see replacing alu with a more easily solder able alternative but its not going to magically improve your light over the improvements a direct bonded copper star will make, and its just as easy to silver solder a copper star to a brass pill as it is to solder a star to a copper pill, you still have a junction there and lead/rosin solder is a pretty crap thermal conductor tbh.

Good luck with this either way, I just don’t see the benefit, I’d love to be proved wrong but there’s nothing yet.

Personal experience tells me that the copper pill will take much more heat away from the star than an aluminum one will…all other things being equal. I have soldered connecting wires to the copper star on my HD2010 pill too many times. With this light I have learned to mod. It’s not really difficult to solder to the star when it’s on the stock aluminum pill. But, after I put 1/2” of copper in the core of the pill, cutting out the middle of the pill so that the copper star is sitting directly on top of the copper….my Hakko 888 station is taxed to solder on it now. So for me it’s fairly easy to see that the addition of a mass of copper to the pill has greatly increased it’s thermal absorption rate. If it sucks the heat out of my soldering iron set to 1000º F, then it will also suck the heat from any emitter I put in there.

A full copper pill would give even more benefit, as it carries even more mass.

Edit: I have also made light engines for the L2P consisting of a 7/8” diameter copper rod 1” long. The star is re-flowed directly to the top of this chunk of copper. If I don’t put some solder paste on the connection pads when I’m doing the reflow, I will not be able to solder the wires onto the star later. My Hakko goes to 1100ºF, it won’t do it if the star is not pre-tinned.

That’s about 3 ounces of copper. Overkill? Beyond me to say. Many of us do things the way we do simply because it’s what we want/like/believe. Works for me.

@DBCstm: Its all correct what you say, but gords main point was that copper is not better than brass. There is enough data to back that claim, though I disagree with lead being a bad conductor. Its about 8-10times better than Arctic Silver.

The main benefit of copper is, that it can extend your runtime on high in lights that are too small to handle the heat, because it takes longer to saturate the heatsink. Downside of that is, that such lights will take longer to cool down.

I'm an ultralight backpacker and (sports)car guy. Paying for slight mods to gain an edge in performance that's barely perceptible at best is part of the game.

You may be right though, but that's part of the reason I'm asking for slight design changes that will have tangible benefits.

According to an easy search, brass has a thermal conductivity value of 109 as compared to coppers 401. Don’t argue with me, argue with the engineers.

Thermal Specific Den“Thermal
conduct HeatCap _sity _volume”
(W / mK) (J / gK) (g/cc)_ (J/ccK)
Aluminum 250 0.852.7_ 2.3
Brass…… 110 0.388.6_3.2
Copper… 400 0.39 10.5 4.0
Silver…… 430 0.239.0_2.1

All true. But not nearly as significant as you may think. I've posted this pic before and I'll post it again:

Taken from here: http://www.taschenlampen-forum.de/modding/13515-bastis-bastelbude-13.html#post296083

Testing of a copper star on Alu, Cu and Ms (brass) heatsinks.

What matters is the thermal properties of the first material after the LED - the PCB. After that, its pretty much irrelevant. Seeing how good brass performs, a heatsink made out of solder would still work great. See how aluminium gives a lower temperature reading than copper, although the thermal conductivity of copper is higher? Thats because there are other values to consider.

don’t forget.

whilst the pill may absorb more heat, it still has to shed it through the threads, increasing the mass/using a different material merely gives you a bigger heat store, it doesn’t necessarily translate to an ability to allow the light to shed more heat.

I guess thats the point both myself and nightcrawl are trying to make.

yeah, all that copper will make it harder to solder to the pads, but it still might not get more heat out of a light, and that is really the aim here, myself, I’m just happy if a pill is brass rather than alu, and really, according to the facts above, I should be gutted if this were the case.

its all headology rather than technology.