This light is one of the newer Sky Ray Kinds and although it's a nice host it's a terrible light to buy if you are not planning on modding it. It comes with fake Cree emitters with an ugly bluish tint. There is also no pill so the emitters are on a single thin slice of aluminum that is just hanging in mid air. Terrible. On the plus side it's a light that doesn't have any rings in the beam at all. It's build nice with good threads and has a little bigger head to fit the 9x emitters. Nice springs and you could even put a tailcap switch in if you wanted with the way the end cap is built.
The driver is really junk so the first thing I do is pull it out and set it on a hotplate so that all the parts fall off. This leaves the driver for use as a contact board. I take the emitters and aluminum thin MCPC and toss in in a box. (By the way these emitters seemed impervious to de-doming with gasoline). Take the driver board now contact board and use a DMM to find the spots to solder a positive and negative wire.
Solder those two wires to your driver of choice. I chose to build a Zenor mod BLF FET DD ramping driver. This is then wired directly to the emitters the way you normally would. The new driver can then be potted and left to hang inside the empty cavity. If you don't want to pot it then just wrap it good with electrical tape.
Now this light also doesn't even have threads for a pill. It does however have a nice wide shelf for a pill to sit on. So what I did was ordered some 2inch copper discs from Speedy Metal. They were actually about 1/2 inch thick so they were too think to set in and still screw the bezel on. So I broke out a hacksaw and cut it in half. Then I took a sander and sanded the sides until they were basically mirror polished. It's now about 3/16th thick and that is about all that will fit there and allow the head to screw on.
At this point I then mounted the 9 noctigons. Being a little too big for the light I filed them down to size and made sure to remove any burr that was under it from the filing. For emitters I chose 5x High CRI XM-L2 warm white and 4 XM-L2 Cool White. The combo is simply fantastic. It's a little bit rosy like the good nichia emitters but just a little cooler.
To mount this I then sanded the shelf itself down until it was also very smooth and used good thermal epoxy to keep it down. Heat transfer away from the emitters is now fantastic. It's as good as a full copper screw in pill that I was given for another SRK. Of course keep the epoxy layer as thin as possible. The emitters are all wired in Parallel and you can't use too heavy of wire or the reflector will not sit down properly. I don't know if you can see from the picture but I set it up so all the positive wires are on the outside and all the negative wire on the inside. This makes it possible to wire the entire light without having to cross wires over top of each other.
I did use heavier wire in one I made for another flashaholic and did get more lumens but I didn't think the beam was quite as nice as this one because the reflector would not sit down perfectly over the emitters. This light is about 6,000 lumens with decent batteries, the one with heavy wires hit 7,000. One more thing that should be done is to remove the thin wire they have on the tailcap and replace it with a heavier one. I might also do spring mods but probably not.
I'm afraid to ask how many amps that thing is pulling at the tail with 4 fresh HG2's. I know for a fact that one HG2 will deliver 8.5 raw amps to a nichia219c triple 17mm Mountain FET + 7135.
So, 34 amps into 9 XM-L2's, BOOM!
Got light?
That is actually a fantastic match, you will be pulling over 3amps per XM-L2.
How many lumies are w talking about here? 10k? 12k?
It’s about 6,000 or so with regular good batteries. In this case I don’t think it will be all that much more with high amp batteries. The limiting factor here is the size of the wire.
What a nice read on your mod. Thanks for taking the time doing this. I dont know how you do it cutting a 2'' copper disc in half and then filing it down to 3/16'' thick. I'd grab the angle grinder and stuff it right up.
Very nice mod. 6000 lumens hey? If calculate this correctly - 6000/9=666 per emitter. Going by the xml2 output graph that means about 1.5a per emitter. 1.5*9=12 amps total. 12/4=3amps per cell. Sweet setup.
12 A should be achievable in this, (though heat dissipation starts becoming a problem. I did a mod to a SRK Kung ( 4 XM-L2s) and pushed each emitter to 3.5 amps each (14 amps draw from four 25Rs in parallel) but can’t run it for more than a few seconds on maximum. (one test i did one of the XM-L2s desoldered itself from the noctigon due to over heating, there is just not enough metal in these SRK style lights to build good heatsinking.) so i stopped trying to push it any further.
I have tons of floody lights but nothing stock. This is not a thrower light at all though, it’s a huge flood. It does have a hotspot but even though it’s well formed and nice and round it’s not much brighter than the rest of the light. I would say it’s all flood and lots of it.
I did make one of these same models up with 4 or 5 de-domed and that one definitely had more throw and was still without rings. If I hadn’t had the Hi CRI warm whites I would have done the same with this one. I wish it was summer out so you could see this beam with green for a background instead of all the snow. It really makes colors pop out.
