Well, considering the fact that the first time she met me I was using the dishwasher to clean my 125cc carburetor…putting a flashlight in the oven isn’t really annoying for her
Back on April 30th I modified my then brand new Trustfire TR-J20 with 3 of the 9V MT-G2’s, used 35mm Illuminations Machines reflectors and 3 Trustfire 32650’s with 6000mAh and was seeing 13,500 lumens but it would heat up pretty good.
So today I decided to make a heat sink for it and rebuild it…
I decided to add another emitter and make it a quad, using the Ledil Minnie reflector… which is shorter. So I also cut an 8mm thick 78.9mm diameter spacer to sit on top of the emitter shelf (glued it in with Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive) and then I used the same adhesive to affix 4 Maxtoch 26mm copper mcpcb’s with 9V MT-G2s on em.
The filled head is now ready to take the heat from 4 MT-G2s and the light weighs in at 3.5 Lbs with no cells in the tube.
I made an “X” out of copper sheet to solder the positive pads on the mcpcbs to, then soldered an 18 ga lead to the X for power. A longer 18 ga negative lead makes the rounds and is soldered to the negative leads at each stop.
It was doing a bit over 12,000 lumens with the cells low, they’re on the charger now. I was hoping for 15,000 but don’t know if I’ll get it with that long negative lead, it’s bright though, for sure!
I don’t have specific emitter voltage from up top, but a tail reading of 22A is coming off the 3 cells, so is that up there in the 268 watt territory? I know the 9V MT-G2 can do a forward voltage up over 11V when pushed hard but I haven’t opened it back up to get top side readings.
The heat sink with thermal paste on it works beautifully, transferring heat all the way down to the battery tube. It takes a little while for the entire head to heat up, but it heats up pretty evenly, something it didn’t do in stock form. They had the lower head section (above the driver) open, empty, nothing but air, and all along that area is heavily finned on the outside. Filling that void with aluminum really makes use of those fins, and with plenty of heat being made it’s a necessary evil.
Can’t believe the 3.5 Lb weight, I didn’t put any copper in this one (save for the 4 MaxToch copper mcpcb’s)
I discovered that my original inside-the-spring 20ga wire bypass on the switch as broken so I did a through board bypass with 18ga wire by modifying the large switch and it’s housing to let the fat wire fit into the tail cap assembly.
Now, with freshly charged Trustfire 32650’s I’m seeing 14,628 lumens out the front. I’m going to have to call that success, being as how it’s a little more than 10,000 lumens more than the stock light was making with it’s 12 XM-L emitters.
That is a great flashlight, Dale! It must have been tough for you not to put tons of copper in it, even to the point that I like it now :heart_eyes:
From me not a mod, but an observation. My first triple build, back in 2013 was a Convoy S5 with Nichia 219A 4500K high CRI’s on a Illumination Supply triple non-DTP board (Noctigon triple DTP boards were not there yet) and a Qlite driver with 4 extra chips (there were no BLF developed FET-drivers). It is still my most used light, I use it attached to a small stand to illuminate things all the time, for hobby and photography, but also on trips it goes in my luggage. But it is never been mis-treated or anything. It is also one of two triples that I made without glass lens to protect the optic. And look at it now, scrathed, bended and cracked (still works fine though), I’m glad that all my later triples have glass lenses, to protect the optic from bending and scratching, it keeps the light more waterproof too.
Nice work Khas, the spot does indeed look more intense and defined. Cool!
I just got through messing around with an old 3D MagLite that I’d modded before. I put a press fit copper heat sink in the top of the battery tube quite a while back with a COB on it. Using 3 26650’s to drive it from a Zener modified 7 mode driver the COB didn’ t like level 7 and would go blue very quickly. The tint was warmer than I like anyway, so today I pulled the COB and put 3 XP-L HI on the big copper sink, wired in series to run the 3 big cells. I used a Ledil Laila 50mm triple optic, kind of a bugger getting everything lined up but the beam profile looks nice so I’ll take it. 4400 lumens out the front.
Eight out of nine posts from PhilipSmith are Tank spam and the other one is only two words that have nothing to do with the thread topic.
hmmmm, what did I mod today, nothing flashlight related just put together a holder for welding glass to go on the front of my camera lens for long exposure photos :sunglasses:
I got some 26350 cells yesterday. I modded a supfire L5 with an LD-2 driver and xhp70. Haven’t finished yet, I screwed up the switch retaining ring trying to remove it. Also you might note the led is off centre, I did this intentionally to reduce the donut hole.
The next item on my DIY driver wish list is an Attiny conversion for the ax2002 buck driver boards. HQ’s boost boards fill that other side already. That would give us an inexpensive 1A boost and 1A buck driver both with programmable modes.