Cyclops 18M cd flashlight Mod

I stumbled across this cheap light at $62.99 on Amazon and after some research, decided to get it for fun and mod it.
It has been on the market for 10yrs and nobody I could find has tried to upgrade it in a very long time.
So here is some pics BEFORE modding with beam shots and stats to compare later.
It advertises 18 million cd and 30 minute runtime.
2 x 6V rechargeable sealed lead acid batteries in series for 12V output.
HALOGEN BULB: Philips 130/100 watt.
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Actual readings, LOL were less than advertised below.
2000 Lumens
200,000 cd
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I will post more pics as mod continues……
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This automotive led will be going in. I am not convinced it will be much better but the runtime should be.
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08YQW3MPQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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Cool ! Subscribed

Can’t wait to see this!

I bought one of those Cyclops spot lights when they were being blown out the doors of the local big box Costco store around 2007.

Decent reflector but the only way to get the stock bulb to sing was to add a switchable inline 3.6 volt booster battery made from high current RC battery pack NiMH cells.
Only then was the overdriven bulbs output decent for the first 5 minutes or so.
Looking forward to hearing how runtime with the led conversion bulb is.

Large reflectors have a huge advantage if they are of sufficient quality and well focused. But the cheap ones take away a huge amount of performance potential. After several builds, I finally settled on a 100 watt HID. This one reaches far past the 3000’ runway I use as my test range. Fun stuff that still gets used regularly…

Have fun with your build!

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Yes, a 60mm fan is going on the bottom, just below the led. The light has vent slots built in already. :beer:
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Wow, I checked out your build, Awesome ! :sunglasses:
Feels good to mod a light and it finishes like you hoped ! :smiley:
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I have a HID spotlight with a similar size as this (not the Sanmak SM5200, but bigger) bought from Taobao several years ago and sitting around collecting dust. Been thinking about putting in an automotive LED retrofit like this but was lazy to do it lol.

I don’t know anything about CSP emitters, are they good for throw as they seems to be domeless? I have also seen some apparently good LED retrofits which run XHP50.2 or XHP70.2 on Aliexpress or Taobao, and advertised to be using copper DTP.

While I am sure that these LED retrofits would definitely perform better than the halogen bulbs as I am already using these in my car, I am not sure whether they will actually outperform high power HID though consider that there are already 300W automotive HID kits available on the market now at affordable price, which could possibly produce >20,000 lumens per bulb depends on the power system. And you can try to set it up with different combinations to get the most of what you want, for example 300W ballast + 300W bulb to get the maximum lumens, or using a 200W ballast to overdrive a 100W bulb to have better throw (comes with shorter bulb’s lifespan, but bulbs are cheap) and etc.

And one additional thing about the LED retrofits, there are two types of heat dissipation design for this kind of LED retrofits as far as I know. The first one is the fan type which is exactly like the one in the link you shared, and the other one is the long copper threads type. So if you have limited space in the Cyclops light you may consider going for the copper threads type as it saves space and also saving from draining additional power to run the fan, but not sure about how good it is to dissipate the heat though.

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The XHP50.2 or XHP70.2 led kits will have higher lumens, most likely around 4000 to 5000 lumens vs this one that measured 2000 lumens.
I chose this style because it would give a symmetrical beam instead of a flat beam.
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The HID will out perform this LED kit too, however, its runtime will be a very short 10 minutes vs 2 hrs. on low and 1 hr on high.
Guess mah can be increased with loading it with a lot of batteries.
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In the end I had to choose what could fit and give a decent beam.
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Cooling is sufficient to prevent overheating. The Cyclops has vents around the reflector to assist cooling.
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