I must be losing my mind or something, so many things that don’t make sense anymore.
I worked with Stainless Steel on guns from the late 80’s with a gunsmith. I DO know a little something about galling. It takes wear to produce a galling effect. And pressure. Wear, especially on a flashlight, takes hundreds if not thousands of uses in typical normal situations. It could be possible for a thread to be manufactured too snugly, in which case galling would occur quicker. But in 10 uses? Seriously? I call bs.
And I’ve personally built over 30 of the X6 lights, I have 14 sitting right here. I’ve done all sorts of things with them. I have yet to see a reflector cloud up. Not at 17Amps with an SBT-70, not at 7Amps with an XM-L2, not with a de-domed XP-G2 making 103Kcd. Sure is surprising to me that I’ve never heard of these things happening, and they all seem to happen to one particular person in the UK. I’m not trying to be hateful or blameful or anything like that, I’m just astounded at what you keep reporting Sharpie. Maybe you’re some kind of Anti-Flashaholic bad-things-happen-to-me-magnet or something. I don’t know what it is. Thousands of the EEX6 and this reflector have been put out there in BLF Group Buys. Thousands. And right away, within the first dozen uses, you get all the bad stuff. Essence F or something, there’s a common denominator somewhere there. Just trying to figure it out, is all. After years of researching and finding answers, you come along and try to debunk everything in a couple of weeks. From O-rings to centering rings, emitters to reflectors. Doesn’t add up to me, but I don’t understand women either and I’ve spent 29 years married…
Blue light is not conducive to sleep? Really? Man, I must be doing something wrong. I always close my eyes to sleep and I sleep quite well that way. (FWIW, I have a background illumination multi-color LED light on my wall, ready to grab for a shoot, and it’s been acting as my before bedtime nightlight for about a year now. I keep it set to a deep blue that’s dang near a blacklight, making colors fluoresce. This is usually on for 30 minutes to an hour before I got to bed EVERY night. Sleep just fine. Why such a deep blue? It is so low key it doesn’t disturb my 8 yr old son, sleeping in the next room.) Yet another thing for me to not understand. Seems to me that I spent every daylight hour out in the sunshine, blue light, for about 18 years, and slept like a rock. (why do people say “slept like a baby”? Babies are notorious for not sleeping through the night.) A slight blue glow from a miniscule LED under a rubber boot can damage sleep rythms? My wife has French origins, amongst others, and she’s hyper sensitive to power-on lights as well. Hmmmmm…. maybe there’s a certain allocation of rods and cones that are distributed slightly different in some people, making this blue light an issue. I think my wife’s eyelids are transparent, she seems to be able to see the slightest amount of light as a disturbance, even with her eyes closed. For real, I had to put 5% limo tint on our bedroom windows and buy special room darkening blinds as well. (these are cut to a more exacting standard, eliminating the gaps that allow light through) I have to turn lights on in here to read anything in broad daylight on an outstandingly beautiful blue sky day, even with the blinds open!
To each his/her own, there is a good assortment of colors of LED’s available for very little monies if an evil red or putrid green is required to make one feel better. I just bought an assorted kit for $13 with 8 colors and 20 of each. And a neat little book of assorted resistors to fine tune their output, 4250 resistors for $29. (really! 170 values, 25 of each value.) Fine tuning and tweaking should be relatively easy to accomplish.
The bigger the pond, the wider the assortment of fish within it. As BLF grows, in part because of some outstanding group buys, the disparity amongst our members shows brighter all the time. Such is life, I suppose.