Not directly, the threads are the same on both ends but the tube isn’t completely symetrical. So for example the front of the battery tube has a deeper recess than the rear where they mount the spring pcb. Could probably be made to work with some standoffs though.
Also from what I can tell the front of the battery tube body only makes ground contact to the driver through the threads itself. It doesn’t press up against the grounding ring of the driver board directly as is usually the case in other lights of this setup.
It’s probably why I had the flickering problem at the start.
Poor grounding contact only through those solder blobs on the back of the contact board, relies on combined pressure from the press fit and the batteries to make contact. Another area for improvement
So I don’t think lockout by unscrewing the battery tube a turn or two is going to be a possibility.
Small update:
Was tinkering with the light and taking some tailcap/emitter current readings tonight.
In stock form I was getting a stable 2.58A at the tailcap.
Emitter measurements went as follows.
Meter connected with long thin crocodile wires clipped to the original tiny emitter cables gave me 2.04A at the emitter.
Ditching the crocodile wires and soldering my thick meter leads directly to the thin emitter cables gave me an initial peak of 2.69A but then dropping to 2.58A.
The fact that reducing the wire resistance increased the current indicates that this isn’t a true constant current buck regulator right?
Or do I have that backwards?
Upgrading the emitter wires from stock to 20Awg raised the tailcap reading to 2.9A, I also managed to get a voltage reading of 3.17v across the emitter in this setup (that doesn’t seem right to me, going by the datasheet I should be seeing closer to 3.3v to get near 3A).
That’s the last measurement I took before I accidentally shorted the emitter positive across the reflector and blew something on the driver, at that point I only had a firefly mode high and low. All modes still worked but at severely reduced output…
Looking closely at the driver I noticed the supposed sensing resistor (R200) had a burnt mark in the middle and measuring it’s impedance gave me in the region of 50 Ohm.
Ok so I figured if nothing else had been damaged I could just replace the burnt resistor and might as well do some resistor modding while I’m at it.
So I took some of those smaller R500 resistors I had around and stacked 4 of the buggers to replace the R200. Should give me a total value of 0.125 Ohm.
Tested the light and there was lots of light again, the driver was alive once more
Maybe a bit brighter but hard to tell so I took some more tailcap measurements to check. These are a bit weird and I’m really not sure what’s going on anymore. I now get values that start at 2.8/2.9 and steadily rise to over 3 at the tailcap, max I measured was about 3.4A.
I guess the increase is somewhat consistent with the resistor modding but the rise has me baffled…before the mod it was very stable at 2.58A…
Anyway, I don’t really know what I’m doing with testing these kinds of drivers and this whole thing has left me more confused and disheartened than enlightened. The driver may not be working 100% after the short anyway so I would definitely take my values with whole lot of salt…
In any case I will soon be tearing the components off this board and getting a linear driver in this light instead.
So much easier to understand and control
Cheers