A couple of years ago, Harbor Freight had some 18V drill/flashlight combos for sale on their Thanksgiving Day sale for around $10… Uses an 18V NiCad pad. I bought a couple. Only opened one up a few weeks ago. The drill is great, if you like off-center chucks that make the bit wobble like a wriggly worm on meth.
A couple of days ago, I tried out the flashlight attachment. It uses 9 x 5mm LEDs. Turned it on. Hey! Where’s the light? Oh, there it is. A whopping 18 lumens of the ugliest prettiest blue 12,550K zombie rotting corpse light I have ever almost seen. Sweeeet. NOT!
Hmmm, maybe a mod is in store for this suck magnet…
Looks like it’s gonna get an XML-T6 driven at 1 amp off of a PT4115E based buck driver… at 18V in and driving a single LED it is around 85% efficient. Should run for around 8 hours at 300 lumens OTF… unless it melts down before then…
I might replace the original pushbutton switch with a dimming pot/power switch… probably not… too much work for a crap light… I’d have to unscrew half a dozen screws.
I’ll probably use the original reflector with the LED peeking out the center LED cup in the reflector. I have the XML curing onto a small CPU heatsink with thermal adhesive.
I have one of those lights that came with a Chicago Electric 4 pc combo tool set. Would like to mod it myself as well. I’d love to see what you come up with! I’d also love to mod the light that came with my Ryobi tool set to LED from an incan.
Got it mod’ed with an XML T6 6300K LED. Draws 180 mA from the battery. Puts out 200 lumens OTF… quite a bit less than expected, but the lens/reflector are rather bad. The plastic lens eats 40 lumens (18%). The beam isn’t all that pretty, but it is over 10 times the original light output.
I glued the star to a small CPU heatsink with thermal adhesive. I had to very slightly trim the corners off the heatsink to get the square peg into the round hole. Drilled out the hole in the center reflector cup to 0.275” for the XML. Tacked the reflector to the heatsink (using the studs that held the old LED board to the reflector) with superglue… who knows how long that will last… Used one of these drivers: http://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10001419/1110706-12v-1x10w-high-power-constant-current-led-driver (They call it a 10W driver, but it is a 1 amp driver. 3.2 watts with a single LED).
This reminds me I’m been wanting to do my makita incan 14.4 drill light. I’ll start a new thread but do u think the led will have to be recessed through into the reflector as the globe that’s in it now sits 5-10mm inside…?
Nope… no front photo. Think of a single reflector cup in the middle surrounded by 8 others. The XML is in the center cup.
At least 8 hours… if the cells are around their rated crapacity. The driver is a well regulated buck driver with around 85% efficiency. It can suck that 18V pack down to below 5 volts before dropping out of regulation.
LED’s dont emit light the same way as incans. I would venture to say that it wouldnt focus right. I havent had any luck focusing an led in an incans reflector, possible though.
I did some poking around on the original CED/”driver” board. It has three paralleled strings of 3 CEDs (crap emitting diodes) in series. Each series string has a 320 ohm ballast resistor, so each string is driven at around 33 mA (with half the input power being wasted in the resistors).
The new driver and LED puts out over 11 times the light at the cost of 1.8 times the input power… over 6 times as efficient.
