What did you mod today?

Uh oh, I’m busted! :laughing:

To my credit, I had enough forethought to NOT measure the HG2’s length with them! :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll get a set with plastic jaws for my electronics toolkit. Thank you both for the safety reminder.

I was afraid that with such little overlap, the pressure from the cell might punch the driver into the recess under the shelf.

I will try your method with the other D80 and another 17mm driver and report back.

Spent a solid day doing some small stuff with the bulk focused on a D01 mod. Reinforced positive contact ring, bypassed springs and traces, mounted a FET driver onto the stock driver, sanded the copper heatsink and the maxtoch mcpcb to 1500. All that is left is to solder the leads to the mcpcb and the switch wires to the driver.

Speaking of switch wires… Is there a particular orientation to connect them to the sides of the OTC on the FET driver or does it not matter?

Great video, X3, I enjoyed that very much!

You could do with a simple led-tester, saves you some time :wink: I use this one, it even works with 3 leds in series because it is powered by a 9V alkaline. It comes with small alligator clips that are very handy, I just swapped the momentary switch for a small clicky switch to be able to use both hands.

Thank you for the kind word, I saw the tester in one of your videos and it seems prctical.
I was too confident in my skills so I waste some time but eh, that’s how you learn things !
The second time I checked them with my DMM, one by one and everything was ok.
I guess one solder joint was not good because orientation were the same before/after…

Bored the driver bay of a Convoy L2 out to take a 22mm MtnMax Buck driver, threaded the bay and made a new threaded brass retaining ring, de-domed an XP-G2 S2 0D emitter on a 20mm Noctigon and used Simon’s new XP centering ring. With a 26650-18650 adapter and 2 Efest 18350’s it makes 2.53A at the tail (about 5A to the emitter) for 306.5Kcd and 1107.25M throw. Nice! :slight_smile:

JB welded a side switch to a Novatac Special Ops. 219c dedomed, Q-lite star firmware driver.

Gotta love JB Weld. The Stick formulations, especially Water Weld, are fast set up and I love the jelly-roll layout. Slice off a piece, knead it till it’s mixed and plug-n-play. A few minutes later you can drill and tap it. :slight_smile: It’s white though, sometimes that matters. I haven’t tried a Sharpie on it, hmmmm….

Had a Sunwayman C10R laying around. Purchased it a few weeks ago from Illumn on clearance. Sunwayman used a single head for many different lights including the 1x18650 C20C. The C10R is the 1xCR123 version. Nice shape, crappy output due to its low power driver and old cool white XML1 LED.

I wanted to turn this light into a small triple-XPL HI light. However .... 1x16340 just isn't enough power for me. I wanted more! I removed the guts of the light and examined the available internal space. I ended up performing the following mods:

  • Mounted a new internal momentary switch in the button well. One side of the switch is connected to the head with conductive epoxy. The other side is soldered to a small brass strip that passes through the LED platform to a small wire and then to the driver.
  • Added a 17mm BLF17DD FET driver with moppydrv momentary firmware from MtnElectronics.
  • Mounted the driver on top of the LED platform where the LED star used to sit. The driver is not glued in place, but is instead held down via tension fit with a surrounding spring-loaded copper strip. A piece of a spring is soldered to the outside of this strip and presses into a small spot in the head where I ground off the anodizing. The strip then presses the side of the driver for negative connection.
  • Added a 20mm triple Noctigon with 3xtriple XPL HI (2x5000K and 1x4000K). The star sits on top of the spring loaded copper strip.
  • Added a Carclo 10507 optic.
  • I soldered a small copper disk to a short piece of wire passed through a small hole in the center of the emitter platform. This wire is then soldered to the positive battery terminal on the driver. When the light is assembled this wire is folded up under the driver.
  • I used arctic alumina to pot the LED positive and negative connections on the driver.

Essentially the driver, emitters and optic all sit where the original star and reflector used to sit. The space where the original driver sat is completely empty. The new switch is very flat so a longer battery slides below it. The light now fits an Efest IMR 18500 cell.

Powered it up and it works! Took a couple tries to figure out the best way to get positive and negative connections. Output is VERY high. At a guess maybe 2500 lumens with a beautiful neutral tint. Not bad for a light that in its stock configuration was rated by the manufacturer at 190 lumens.

However, this light has pretty limited heatsinking. The LED is not mounted on a star and I didn't use thermal grease where the sides of the star meet the head. I figure if it becomes a problem I'll notice when the star desolders itself. If that happens I'll add the thermal grease and learn to live with the hotter head.

sounds good, but that mod screams pictures, firelight2 !
(but I do not always take pictures either…)

I found that an Olight S10 clip perfectly fits a Thorfire TG06 for a deep pocket carry :slight_smile:

Graphitized some more small lights in the collection

I got the Lixada 3800 lumen triple that robo819 wrote about, in trying it with 3 cells it got hot and a cap came loose effectively limiting the light to a .25A draw. So, since I was planning on modifying it anyway, I had at it. :slight_smile:

After an afternoon’s worth of machining and tweaking, I ended up with a triple that actually bests the 3800 lumens written on it’s side (it made 1797 on 2 cells right out of the box) Now it pulls 10.73A for 3946.35 lumens. :slight_smile: Sweet!

Nice work, CRX, I think the effect is really cool! How durable is it? Do you expect it to break loose when you drop the light?

Attached a new baseplate to the inside of the battery tube of my modded Sunwayman C10r.

Previously, I’d been using the stock spring, but that wasn’t ideal as it reduced max current to the light and stuck up a little more than I’d like. I soldered a small copper disk in the center of a large copper disk. Then attached this to the bottom of the battery tube with a small amount of arctic alumina at a point only on one side of the disk.

The epoxy is there just to keep the disk from falling out. Tension from the battery pressing into the center of the disk is what gives the disk good contact with the rest of the battery tube.

The light no longer needs a spring because with an 18500 cell inserted there is no extra room in the battery tube anyways.

Thanks, yeah it’s something different from just shininess, the use of other materials for decorating battery sleeves etc seems to be coming in at the moment too.
I’ve just been modifying my existing lights recently as i have been thinning out my collection to keepers only and thought i would try this out.
Dropped a couple during the sanding process, still ok. I cleaned the lights really well with acetone, roughened up areas with diamond file and used decent quality epoxy. The ones with the thicker layers should be ok for durability, i would expect some chipping on the thinner areas if kept next to keys etc in a pocket but i usually carry an edc light in it’s own pocket anyway so it should be fine for me.
I had thought about using silicone carbide powder instead of graphite for durability but that would be much more work to sand down i think. Cerakote or something similar would probably be ideal for this.
The Mini 02 & Hobi will be the test pieces as they will go on a keyring with other metal objects. Time will tell.

Thanks for the info! :slight_smile:

Thanks CRX
I was going to ask you how you did that. I’m still not exactly sure, but it sounds like a lot of careful work. Maybe you should post a separate thread that shows the process from A to Z, as I haven’t seen one.

Not so much careful work as messy! It’s quite a simple process though.

I will try to explain what i did with the lights.

First i roughen up and clean well the areas to be treated. I use a small diamond file where i can then acetone.

I use very fine graphite powder and a decent quality clear epoxy. If you can get black or other colour then that’s fine too, but i quite like to use the term “graphitized”. :person_facepalming:

Mix it up so it’s black and consistent - it doesn’t take much powder and spread it over the desired areas, trying to avoid bubbles and get it into all the grooves and such (Bubbles are the enemy!).
The deeper the grooves the better i think.
The tricky part is making sure the areas are covered well and stay covered, this means holding and slowly rotating the light until the epoxy sets in stiff enough and stops rolling around all over the place.
Use more than needed.
Come to think of it, i must have been doing this for about 8hrs total over the last couple of days as i ran out of quick setting 5 minute epoxy and only had 1hr setting stuff left for the last ones i did. :laughing: But anyway…

Set it looks like this

Once it is set hard enough i use an OLD WORN file to take off most of the excess by placing the light on top of the vice jaws and rotating as i file round it just down to the level of the light body, no more.
Don’t use a new file as this will end up eating into the flashlight body.

At this stage i used 600 grit sandpaper to round it off, then 1000 grit to smooth it and give the light a brushed finish. I suppose you could take it further to a polished appearance.

The graphite epoxy is very dark grey so i went over it all with a black pentel permanent marker (other markers may leave a purplish colour) It seems to be absorbed fairly well. Leave it for a few minutes then i wipe it over with a cloth and lighter fluid a few times to remove the excess ink.

Hopefully that leaves you with something like this

And before

CRX. So cool.