What did you mod today?

Nice place to start and you picked a good member to emulate.

You cant go wrong watching OL videos. They are very inspirational.

I didn’t mod anything today but….received my first order from Russia from Kiribi-ru. S2+,S2series, x6, x5, spacers, triples, quads, optics on and on. Very well packaged in a case all separated. Looking forward to this! Hey…retired guys can have fun too.

Emitter swapped the emitter in my Sunwayman V11R mirage.

Finally figured out how to use strap wrenches properly so there was no damage to the anodizing. Replaced the cool white XML U3 with a 5000K XPL HI of unknown bin. Didn’t bother filing a Noctigon down to size. Just grabbed the nearest approprriate sized aluminum star. Tint, output and throw are much improved. :smiley:

I just modded my beloved Tank007 E09 to a 219c/FET+1.

I give the body of my v10r ti some work. Ideally I wanted to knurl the body but a couple of things prevented me from doing so. 1. I haven’t worked with Ti before and 2. I would need to cut the body right back to get it cylindrical again, I don’t know if the walls would stand up to the knurling tool after that.

Unfortunately I cracked 2 of the 4 trits in the tail. I have no idea how I did that on a 3 jaw chuck???


Bugger. How far into the machining did you get?

Wasn’t sure I understood your question but then I noticed pics weren’t showing again :weary: I don’t know what up with that, they’re all coming from the same file???

Emitter swap in my X6 triple :

From Nichia :

To XP-L HI :

Animated :

the Lii-100 is a USB-powered multi-chem-Charger with Powerbank feature

on google i stumbled once over an mod by hypertonie from a german forum - he upgraded the charger with an small voltmeter

and so did i... - now its also a LiIon-cell-tester!

i bought the Voltmeterhere: http://www.banggood.com/0_28-Inch-2_5V-30V-Mini-Digital-Voltmeter-p-9742...(link is external)

do not forget to adjust the potentiometer for accurate reading!!!

open the Lii-100, cut a rectangular hole and fit the voltmeter (2 drops of glue)

done!

Another fun build finished.

Installed a 15mm FET driver in my Thrunite T10T triple XPL- HI.
Modified forward clicky.
Aluminium heatsink.
Some decorative lines on the tube.
Around 9Amps startup on turbo mode :sunglasses:

And yesterday Vollsion SP-11 s with driver mod, XP-L HD 2C and magnetic tail.

Wow, I really like that volt meter mod! I think I will mod a few of my Lii-100s!

I did a shorty S2+ triple with red Nichia 219B's today.

I did a test on these leds the other day that I still need to publish, it performs well but not as good as the red Cree XP-E2.

For the mod I sawed the pill in the middle so only 6mm of the driver side of the pill is used, and the triple Noctigon was soldered on top of the now hollow pill. Together with the short Carclo 15070 optic (the stock glass lens was kept in place), and a smaller spring in the tail, this made the battery compartment 18500 size. I tested the output with a Sanyo 1700mAh 18500 battery.

For a driver I used the new KD-light 3A lineair driver. At least in this application this driver is not ideal: by soldering the S4 bridge I have set it to a simple low-med-high no memory, and low appears to be 4.5mA / 0.14lumen, med 140lumen, high 3.05A / 340lumen. On top of this very bad mode spacing, changing modes goes pretty awkward, every time you click to change mode it first goes to low. So if you want to go from low to med you have to click low-med so two times, if you want to go from med to high you have to click low-med-high so three times. Even though I quite like the red moonlight mode, I may change the driver sometime.

The 7135 chips have to burn off a lot of overvoltage when using red leds so they have to be heatsinked well. But in the S2+ the screw-in driver retaining ring can not be used when there are 7135 chips on the battery side of the driver, so the driver has to be soldered to the pill, and while I was at it I made it big blobs where the 7135 chips were. For this type of soldering my 80W Antex soldering beast is ideal, it is a breeze to solder stuff to brass pills with it.

The beam is nice, a distinct very red hotspot with a not too obvious 'starry' edge caused by the three rotated square projections of the led dies (so a 12 pointed star), see short video of the white wall beam while rotating the flashlight. (mind that red leds do funny things with camera's; in reality there's no sharp edge around the hotspot but it is all smooth and one single colour)

This light will get a (red of course) lighted tail, to be done later.

Nice. I hadn’t even considered coloured nichias. From the video it looks slightly more cherry red than the XPE2. How is the heat handling with the sawed off pill?

Do nichia make any weird colours I don’t know about? Im looking for something different to try.

Make a triple with 1 red, 1 green and 1 blue LED. Maybe the output will blend into white light :sunglasses:

Actually if that worked and you had the right driver it could make for a neat light: run each LED separately to have only red, blue or green. Or run them all together for white. All in the same light.

Or if you really want to go to the next level and have MAD programming and engineering skills, you could have the output of each LED vary. If you did it right you could end up with a variable brightness variable color light able to output any color in the visible spectrum.

These colour 219B’s are only recently on the market, I found them at leds.de (=Lumitronics). They are indeed just slightly more red than the red XP-E2 (630nm vs 625nm), but I do not see a real difference.
I made it because I teach my (yearly) school project again with camera obscura’s and old-school blackandwhite photographic paper. This makes quite perfect darkroom lighting.

There’s a whole branch of commercial research devoted to that, and making all colours and good quality white requires quite specific leds. I will look up a small article that I read about it from Lumileds.

Nice job djozz. I’m not sure though that you did not want to just show of your soldering skills. Yes the soldering looks nothing like I do. More like Tom E’s. :stuck_out_tongue:

TRUSTFIRE A8 (26650 quad)

This is an older light that came out in the early days of the 26650. It’s certainly a well made light by the actual Trusfire company. Lot of attention to detail and beautiful machining. In fact, it had enough interest to have a BLF Edition group buy, then faded from memory, never to be mentioned or heard from again.

What happened? I don’t really know, but since it was the times before direct thermal path mcpcbs and FET drivers, it never really achieved its potential. Basically a very chunky light with an average beam and long run time.

Personally, I never liked the way they recessed the lens way down deep below the bezel. The same reason I don’t like the Convoy M2.
I was thinking of grinding down the bezel to a thin ring and bringing the lens forward, but I wasn’t sure about my capabilities of filing down stainless steel with my hand tools and perhaps wrecking the whole light, so I left it.

Time to get started on my balcony workshop.

It’s getting there.

For some reason, my calculations were off by 7mm, so I had to cut a second slug.

Although lined with a brass ring, the pill had one of those very shallow recesses for a press fit, so I built a mountain FET driver using one of the extra thin pcbs that RMM offers.

I drilled the hole through the center of the board myself to bring the positive lead up through the spring.

Just fiddling about and killing time

There! That thin PCB fits in there perfectly flush.

They even thought to add a nice delrin driver cover that threads in there. Very tidy.

Tpad with 4 x XP-G3 S5 3A and 22 AWG Teflon wires.

35mm Khatod quad optic sanded down to 30mm.

I knew my heatsink was tall enough, but when I had everything tightened down something was rattling around in there. The leg pins of the optic were a little too long for the Tpad so the apertures were standing too high above the emitters, so I just sanded them down a little.

All my 26650 were inside other lights, so I just used the only one I had available in my box. Some older green Sony cell.
It gave me 16A on high. Even with the light running, the larger 26650 cell seemed to have no problem holding at 16A on high with the FET driver.

Maybe not an everyday EDC light, but a good out of doors jacket pocket light.

You could try carrying it in your trousers but…

Thats a nice mod Of. Its a shame the lights no longer made. I gave one to dad years ago when they came out and its the most abused looking thing you would see and the thing just keeps on going.