What did you mod today?

My excuse is that daylight saving is finished and I cannot take a picture for quids in the lounge so hopefully Iā€™ll get a couple of pics of the long and short version this weekend.
The electrical short that had me in tears.
I was at the stage of replacing the star with the four leds on it, while waiting for the soldering iron to heat up I thought why dont I have a look through the two dollar loupe that losttheplot gave me (cheap skate $ ) complete with miniature led lights and a bazillion zoom. Well blow me down if there was not a hair like thread of wire soldered to the + pad hanging over one of the locating holes for the peg on the TIR. It was not until the TIR was pushed home by the bezel that it would short. This wire I could not see with my normal magnifying glass. After removing the short bingo, we had light when we should of.

Glad you found your short. Itā€™s always something. Luckily when we run into these problem, we know that they are contained within a one square inch area so we can eventually ferret them out.
I really do want to see a photo of this light. I just canā€™t picture it in my minds eye.

I want to see a photo of Steve in the lounge using the loupe to find that thin wireā€¦ :wink:

The lights nothing special to be honest. It has parts in it given to me by Dale. Thanks Dale, but he wont want to know that its only powered by a humble 1 or 2 NiMH batteries.
The pictures, I was trying to take in the lounge room and the louping was carried out in the shed. :wink:
Iā€™m pretty sure I would be shot if I brought the soldering iron into the lounge room. Iā€™m not as lucky as some others here. :slight_smile:

Put a 5D XPL into my Olight S1 Ti. Found Turkeylords video on how to get the head open and it went well. Got the old board out, filed down a new one for the XPL, reflowed and tested the board, all is good. Got the board in well, soldered to the correct wires and it worksā€¦ Sort of . The XPL in the XM-L2 TIR is a square kind of beam, not too bad, I can live with itā€¦ The XPL must have a different enough Vf to affect the UI, now the single click to off goes to moonlight and sometimes it cuts off after a few seconds, most of the time it does not. It stays in MLā€¦

Now I need to find a high CRI XM-L2 and do this againā€¦

Did you by chance find this video in one of my post on this topic ? :sunglasses:
Did you ever try the 7A3 tint ? I choose this one for my S1 and itā€™s a really warm white with good CRI (judging by eyes, I donā€™t know the official value)

X3, it was your postā€¦ I had the 5D ready for this light, a nice halogen yellow colorā€¦ I have a 7A3 XPL, but not XMLā€¦ I thought about the 3000K XPL HI tooā€¦

i must be getting really bored waiting for toys to arrive from china, lol.

i had spent a couple dollars on a clearance china-tastic zoomie at BIG LOTS. 3xAA zoomie, and a little bit thicker and longer body than i am used to seeing in a low budget zoomie. My several 1504ā€™s are the only 26650 zoomies i own until the china boat gets here, soā€¦

i am looking at the thicer than normal tube, and its a little longer than it needs to be,ā€¦ opened it up.

aluminum pill thank god, hollow no doubt but i didnt check. the driver has the LONGEST SPRING i have EVER seen on anything. really longā€¦ they made the light longer, then filled the space up between driver and 3xAA battery carrier with this long spring. Its SO long? it had a little plastic insert to keep the long spring from going catty-wumpus and missing the top of the + of the battery carrier. Hmmmm.

the plastic insert is sandwiched between 2 circlips riding grooves above and below the plastic tube insertā€¦ got them out, and now had more than enough room to put in a spare 26650 for long runtimes on the 630ma cheap driver. It works with the 26650 now, and i can bang it around it stays okay. for now anyways. Taking out the circlips allowed the plastic spacer to move forwards giving room for the 26650 to easily fit into it.

i have to make a little plastic tube and drill it out for the long spring to go thru it and hold it so it cant slip off the 26650, and, so i dont have to ā€œknowā€ how to put the battery in, i can just slap the 26650 in and go.

emitter looks like a little CREE with 3 bars on itā€¦ wonder what driver would be appropriate for itā€¦i guess it looks like it might be an XP-Eā€¦

I have a copper S1 coming in the mail (thanks, X3), and am copying his mod soon, ordered a XM-L2 T4 7A3 for it, Simon has the led for cheap! Using a XM-L2 over XP-L (hi) saves you solving centering problems and beam artifacts.

7A3 with copper is the warm way to go :smiley:
I plan to mod my new SRmini II with these little fellas too :innocent: , gotta be a nice ambient lamp in the living room !

I, uh, sorta couldnā€™t help myself.

Thorfire S70 came yesterday just before dark. It was making 3657 lumens out of the box. Tried a couple of different cells, at 4.18V and 4.22V, really nice output but, well, you know.

So I cracked her open. Dropped an R070 on top of the 2 R091ā€™s. Added a 18 ga spring bypass to the driver spring, 20ga through pcb on the switch.

WOW! Not having time after midnight to fully recharge the cells Iā€™d used earlier in the evening I did manage to see 5700+ lumensā€¦ on cells at ~4.12V.

Over 2000 lumens increase! Stock sense resistance was 0.045, it is now 0.027. Fresh cells will show me over 6000 lumens on this big heavy deeply finned light. But the regulation was far better straight out of the box, only dropping 21 lumens in 30 seconds. With it resistor modded the hit is much bigger as it runs, dropping numbers very fast on the light box. Gotta charge up cells today and give it another lookā€¦

So all of us who thought it looked like more than 3000 lumens were right. good to know! What kind of tailcap readings do you get? I wonder how many lumens Iā€™m getting with the resistor bank completely bridged.

Awesome! You have some pictures of those spring bypasses? (Still in the learning stage)
Also you sure the stock sense resistors where r091ā€™s? Thought they where r901ā€™s, stupid enough I didnā€™t look close enough when I had mine open.
Iā€™ve ordered some 0.2ohm sense resistor to play with, but looks like they are on the high side.

I got the Basenā€™s charged up and ran 9.05A at the tail for 5971.95 lumens. BUT it dropped 545 lumens in 30 seconds to 5426.85.

Stock, right out of the box, it only suffered a 21 lumen drop in 30 seconds. Obviously the heat sink and/or the cells canā€™t handle the bump all that well. In the few seconds of testing the cells went down to 4.11V. These are new Basenā€™s, only ran the few minutes of testing in this and another light.

Wonder if the Efest 4200ā€™s will break that 6000 mark? Hmmmmā€¦ā€¦

Edit: Am I sure about the R091? Well I was til you said that! :stuck_out_tongue: Yeah, Iā€™m pretty sure, because I ran the parallel resistor calculator on em last night to figure if I wanted to run the R070 or R068 that I had on hand.

To be honest, one said R091 and they put the other one on upside down, ugh. So no, I didnā€™t remove it to make absolutely certain that the second one had the same value.

I have hit over 10amps on my Basens, so Iā€™m probably pulling just over 6000 then (for a short time). I did shave my dome though, so maybe I lost some there.


I re-did the short tube for my A6. The ā€œold versionā€ did not quite fit on the tail side even after modding. Since now I had three shot tubes from BG, that were all wrong I went full retard - removed anodizing and used dremel cut disk on the threads :smiling_imp: Also added lighted tail tailcap. It draws 0.2mA right now, but itā€™s still a bit too bright. I might redo it later on :smiley:

Any good hints where I can get a raw copper S1 with ss bezel for a good price?

In the process of pulling the S70 back down some. The calculator says adding 4 1ohm resistors will give me .0385 in place of the stock .0455 so Iā€™m going with that and keeping it within itā€™s abilities. About to double check that the mcpcb is DTPā€¦.

Edit: Mcpcb is indeed direct thermal pathā€¦

With the 4 1 ohm resistors in place I get 5.03A on the Basenā€™s for 4264.2 lumens at start, 4153.8 at 30 seconds. More reasonable losses Iā€™d say.

While I was back in it I put 16ga Turnigy wire on the driver, removed the mcpcb and cleaned up the thermal paste to get a look at the shelf, itā€™s machined decently but has lines from the bit fairly pronounced. Used Arctic Alumina Thermal Paste putting it back in.

Dale, anybody, where are you getting your resistors of those values? I can only find .05 and .015.

Olight TC10 Ti rebuilt today.

Youā€™re making a lot of beautiful lights lately, CRX. This is another piece of art!

(are those 4 squares neodynium magnets?)