Solarforce Z1 - 1600 lumens on your keychain

I love the way you achieve some fantastic results cc. Thanks for posting the pictures.

Comfy, maybe I’m getting one really cheap. How easy is the disassembly? I for myself just want to swap the G to a 219B.
:bigsmile:

I used copper pipe sections, cut into C-shapes, and used pliers on the pill threads and pliers on the head. One light came apart before I even tried, the Loctite didn't bond, I guess. I was just unscrewing the pill to change the battery and the head unscrewed off the pill instead. The other one required pliers but wasn't too bad, the Loctite is only in one smallish area and not slathered all over everything like some lights I have seen.

Original LED is on a 14mm board, but the ID of the top of the pill is 15.5mm. Wouldn't be much trouble at all to file down a 16mm copper board to fit, but thickness would be an issue. You might could make up the difference with a thinner o-ring at the lens, the stock one is fatter than it needs to be to make a seal.

The driver can only be removed by pushing the LED wires down through the holes, and using a rod/wire from the top to press the driver out the bottom. Driver is a two-board setup and pressing it out is inevitably going to tweak the pins between the two at least a little, but it's a pretty basic setup and is no big deal to straighten or resolder the pins if one of the solder joints breaks. It's only held in by a white plastic retaining ring (on the battery side) and only gets a ground connection through sheer luck of how well it touches the step inside the pill. I would consider adding a separate ground wire soldered between the contact board and inside of the pill.

you're the king of common household tools extreme modding, comfy! I love the neat stuff you do with cheap tools.

Now that I have been looking a lot at drivers lately (thanks to you): is that D14D part a FET they are using on this driver, and can you beef it up with one of those 70NO2's to get more amps?

It's a little boost driver (it'll run the LED just fine from a single 1.2v NiMh), I don't think the boost driver's performance is dependent on the FET like a linear/DD one is.

I don't know for sure if that R200 is a limiting resistor, or a sense resistor. Either way, tweaking it should also tweak the output.

Disregard that part - I checked the o-ring and it's thinner than I thought, it's 1mm already. You could omit the o-ring and glue the lens into the bezel with clear silicone and get most of the room you need to fit a thicker MCPCB. Still might require a bit of sanding on the bottom of the copper board.

Spacer will end up somewhere around .200"-.210".

Plan is to bend the shelf in the pill upwards a bit, then press in the spacer to force it back down flat. And then rivet the whole mess together with the .250"OD copper tube through the middle.

Is that a spacer from MTNElectronics?

Nope, 3/4" 6061 bar stock. http://www.ebay.com/itm/360670546100

WHY is there no 18650 version of this light?? :~

I thought the answer to this was simple. Because you haven't built it yet. I'm really looking forward as usual to see how it turns out. Cheers.

Pfff, you know I don't do things from scratch. Besides it sure seems like they were planning to do a whole line of 'Z' series lights, did the CR123 Z1, the AA Z2, and then... just gave up. Do you realize how many they would sell?

The step on the spacer is .010" taller than the recess in the pill, to make sure it makes full contact with the shelf and not the upper face of the pill.

There's a lot of stuff I'm not sure of, but one thing I know without a doubt is that spacer's not coming out of there without destroying either the pill or the spacer or maybe both. Good thing the threads were loose to start with, otherwise it would probably not fit afterwards. The press fit was around .006-.007" so it's now quite a bit bigger at the threads.

The SolarForce T1. Though I’d like to see a Z series 18650 light as well. Great mod work BTW.

Still need to shave down the top of the spacer so that the head bottoms out juuuust when the o-ring is squashed the right amount, and install the copper rivet-tube thing.

Cool show, I like this channel.

Wow comfy. That’s some nice polishing there.

Fine, I’m in for one. Also I’m stupid envious of all that you’ve done in this thread.

Oh my goodness man, what do you use to polish this baby this buttery smooth. Mothers mag and aluminum polish? HFT stick polish? I need to know with what and how! Amazing.