ebay ultrafire 26650 light mods

ebay 13.99 special 26650 light.
26650 light
pic was after i shaved the spacer.
needs thermal management work to push it though.dont just bypass resistor like in a srk.melted solder and shorted.led lived after i removed excess solder and reflowed it.
1.4a stock with a fresh kingkong.
has potential and cheap!
!!

I got 2 coming this week… if anything I just want to add some resistor just enough to give it a little bump while maintaining the run time :slight_smile:
something like around 3A should do it :smiley:

i dont think the star it uses is good enough for 3a.
mine was over 3a though when it melted the solder and soldershorted.
and the shelf it rests on could be better.i am going for 2a for the next test.added thermal compound to the edge of the star too.

Ok maybe not 3A… maybe 2.5A? :smiley:

looks like a clone/varient of the skyray s4

I am sure that in some cases, increasing the current will actually give you less light. Even at current levels of less than 3 amps. If the loss of lumens due to an increase in temperature is greater that the bump in lumens due to the greater current one can actually end up less bright. Tricky business, this modding.

That may be the wall we hit on this one.
I had done a quick tailcap current test at over 3a.
I reassembled and it ran 30sec and started blinking.
gotta see if the board is a size I can get in copper.
now everyone here has one coming aand they will all get modded.
mine is the guinea pig.

Mine is arrived today… not bad for something I paid for less than $12,feel solid and heavy for light in this price range,comes with adapter for 18650 battery and it has XM-L2 T6.

I liked the driver, HIGH-LOW- hidden strobe just like in SRK :smiley:
the driver seems like it’s modable with resistor mod,or maybe remove the FET and put in the new FET? but just can push it too high though as the LED sit on hollow pill :_(
put some copper disk on it and the whole head act as a heat sink :bigsmile:

definitely worth the price for what I paid for it and good thing I ordered 2 of these light :bigsmile:

Pic of the driver

do you have a picture of the pill?

Picture of the pill

Thanks to advise from comfychair… I moved the LED- to L0 and it definitely a lot brighter now :slight_smile:
simple and cheap mod :bigsmile:

beam shot comparison

stock on top and modded on the bottom

same as mine except yours has an added 1 ohm in the pads that are empty on mine.
where did yours come from?

mine came from Aliexpress

be ready to open it up fast if it shorts!fried the led wires.if you are using a tired/high ir/cheap battery you might get away with it.you wont with a kingkong 26650!
put thermal compound on the led ledge to give it a fighting chance.
btw how bout a link to the one you bought?

Actually I did put king kong on it… and it’s fine, I did however put some thermal compound on the ledge, maybe planning putting copper disk at the bottom of the star.
I bought it from here
not a bad light at all for the price :smiley:

hmmm
maybe the compound lets it just squeak by.
mine without compound solder shorted in about 30 seconds.
btw the one i linked will get in under a week.
i also suspect that these are gonna be like snowflakes like the srk.
no 2 alike even in the same order!
edit added .51 to empty pad.
now at 3a on fresh kingkong.
compound might be the trick.
maybe not assembled right?
way too much solder that didnt conduct heat well?
i removed quite a bit.
anyway no smoke yet and head warmed up quickly.

hmm… I don’t see any empty pad on my driver … do you have the same driver as mine?
btw… mine comes with XM-L2 :smiley:

mine is empty where your 1r0 is.or was.
added a .51 leaded part to mine.
another thought is that mine came with a low vf bin led.might explain why the move the wire mod made it unhappy.
its fine now after dumping 2 kingkong and 2 other old 26650 through it.
i suspect we will see other odditys as we mod these.
my guess is the mfr gets the oddball led’s no top tier mfr has a use for.and get em cheap.
noticed a slight greenish hue to this one.could be tint shift from its close brush with death by overheating to solder melt :wink:

well the new batch came in today and they got modded.
higher vf bin.took .27 added to get in the 3a range.dd will kill these.3.5a and rising fast.didnt wait for it to melt solder.this with a fresh off the triton kingkong.
they seem happy at just shy of 3a after adding compound to the ledge.and all 3 of these were slightly different.2 say cree xml on the star and one does not.
1 even had a fragment of a centering ring in the head.it fell out and i thought the thing broke.but it was intact.of course i sanded it down.
switch ring loose on one.easy to tighten.