Convoy S2+ failing a ~75cm drop...

Well, was on my bedside table and while putting it on it, I missed the table. Fell head first on the floor and stopped working. I unscrewed it and this is what I saw….The LED has detatched so has the plastic…

Anyways how to fix it? This has been my EDU flashlight but I am less than impressed it did not survive such a low fall when Simon shows much much more on falls….
This was bought from Gearbest. I doubt it will be worthwhile to engage with CS for a replacement/fix :smiley:

i have dropped my S2+ several times already, even in my garage onto a tile floor. nothing happened.

guess you have to reflow the emitter.

if you don’t have a reflow hot air station you can make do with a hot plate or a regular heat gun.

No clue how to do this (reflow) and I don’t have any of those….What you mean by hot plate?

Wow, never seen that before.

check whether the LED is still working (I use a multimeter or a test station)

clean the emitter base plate if necessary, I would then use a no clean flux pen (or similar), put solder paste on the pads and then position the LED. you can either put this on a hot plate (like a mini oven) or reflow with hot air (gun or reflow station). Old-Lumens also had a cool video somewhere with it, found it:

Otherwise example temperature profile would be here:

I never stick exactly to these temperatures but try to be as close as possible.

edit: if you don’t have solder paste try it with regular solder, it should work.

A curious aside, what driver do you have in that S2+ and is the driver held by a retaining ring, or solder blobs, or both?

I have seen two Convoy M1’s do the same thing.

You could just order another LED on a Noctigon from IOS

3D XM-L2 on Noctigon

It looks like the drop did what it did by hitting just right… it is amazing how sometimes the smaller things can do such things like dedome the LED.

To replace the LED is just two wires to desolder and resolder on the new LED, about as hard as the reflow of the current LED.

It happened to me, I have analyzed the fact and I arrived at these conclusions: (in my case)
The LED is not original Cree; for soldering is not used a good solder; LED is slightly off center and this causes a lateral thrust from the reflector, when there is a collision, even banal, the lateral thrust separates the LED from the base. Briefly: the LED was assembled cheaply and approximate.
I remedied solder it again, with good solder, and placing well in the center. The LED have not changed, but is closely supervised! :slight_smile:

Cree isn’t the one that mounts them to the mcpcb. I don’t see a reason to believe they aren’t genuine Cree emitters. It looks like whoever Simon buys his emitters from is either not using enough solder paste or not heating them high/long enough in the reflow oven.

But this was from gearbest. They could be buying hosts and adding their own leds. Who knows with them. Led might not have been relowed by Simon’s suppliers.

Good point.

It happened to my initial fake C8 batch. I suspect power quality of solder being used.

I later reflowed it with Cu MCPCB and it works fine till now.

If that counts, the light has been used on max power (10 mins or so at times) and medium modes (25-30mins average) at times.
If I just add solder and solder back the led to it, will it work again?

Make sure the Negative pad on the LED is aligned with the negative lead pad on the board. The thread above is a good reference for figuring it out.

The led die (square) came off the plastic too. The plastic is not properly marked + or -. I will have a closer look tonight if there are markings on it.
Thanks for this thread link.

I didn’t think it was possible to separate a good solder bond like that.
A cold solder? Yes.

Chinese manufacturers should stop using high temp solder already, my BLF A6 had the same problem in both the driver and the mcpcb, the soldering they use are the cheapest type with high melting point and fast-burn rosin, doesn’t work long enough before the solder spreads. Also tried to desolder leads from a nitecore mcpcb and even my 40W station couldn’t do the job.

I’ve been using low-melt solder for my reflows and haven’t had any problem even with my hot rod mods. Low-melt are more expensive, but it also saves a lot of time and headache.

Thanks. Just watched it. Looks doable!!