For the 1st time ever I ordered an LED to swap out, it arrived in the post with a lint cloth - the type for cleaning glasses.
It may seem like a daft question but having never done it before i don’t touch the LED itself do I ?
I’m guessing the cloth is just “a nice touch / added extra” and is meant to give the lens a wipe over with …… am I right???
Apologies if it seems like a dumb question but as I say if you’ve never done it before I may have misunderstood.
The “don’t touch the lamp” thing is more related to incans, where finger print oils can cause thermal stresses in the glass and result in a fracture. That being said I would not go out of my way to touch the LED dome, or really “scrub” it unless it was unusually dirty for some odd reason. Its OK to just lightly dust it off though.
Cree emitters are pretty robust though. My builds have gone smoothly for the most part. One thing thing I have done more than once is nick the dome with a knife edge or soldering iron. I have to always remind myself to take it SLOWLY any time I am using tools around the LED.
kramer5150 Hi,
Sorry I should have mentioned it’s an XP-L HI so de-domed
To clean an LED just lightly brush it with a microfibre cloth or use compressed air.
Yea it’s fine to wipe it. If the led had a dome you would have to more careful.
Brilliant… cheers all!
… what those guys said…
So I try to avoid the LED dome because there’s no need to handle it, but is it that fragile? I’ve dropped them and they’ve rolled across the workbench plenty of times, and at the end of an emitter reflow to MCPCB I give the dome a flick to squeeze out excess solder - is this considered the acceptable exception to the rule? I’m a relative noob but I’ve yet to have a problem.
Domes are actually way more resistant than I thought, you can drop it or touch it and it won’t get damaged 
If the LED is dedomed however, then you cannot let anything contact the die.