Take a RED XP-E P3 on an aluminum board driven at 1.5A, build up a fasttech p60 kit, drop it in a P60 host from CNQ and you get……4500lux@1M.
Same emitter, same driver,same kit,same host only on a 16mm copper SinkPad directly soldered to the brass pill, now it is putting out 8500 lux start-up and 8200lux@1m after 30 seconds.
this P60 host from CNQ is much nicer than the 501B’s.
that is an amazing difference for a ‘low power’ xp-e. will have to totally rethink acquiring these 
i was considering buying the colour xp-e’s on 10mm mcpcb at cutter
would 10mm perform even worse than a 16mm alum?
if possible, i’d love to see the lux drop of both after 15 mins or so…
my guess is yes, in fact I would hesitate to drive an xpe that hard on a 10mm pcb AND in a p60…
kevin, nice results, thanks for posting.
ok i tested it. i don’t build many p-60 lights so you got me thinkin….
test@ 3m then converted to lux at 1m
this time in pitch black room, previous test did have some ambient light but did not read on the meter. i describe the light body as warm to the touch, nowhere near hot. most other lights with good thermal properties that i build would be hot, but still able to be held after 15 min.
copper
start up—— 8.1Kcd
15min———6.2Kcd
aluminum
start-up——4.5Kcd
15 min———2.4Kcd
looking at these results it may be better to drive the red xp-e’s on aluminum boards at 1A instead of 1.4A. there was no other p-60 tricks used in this build no foil wrap, no fill gaps with thermal goop, add disks of whatever under pill just, built it.
the xp-e’s in your cutter link above are the N4 bin and are rated at 62.0 lm/350mA. the ones i used in this build are P3 bin at 73.9 lm/350mA. i would post a link to the P3 bin xp-e’s, however they are not available as bare emitters at this time. all the suppliers that i know of are out of stock.
that’s fantastic info, thank you so much
although i’ve never done any thermal measurements before, i’m surprised at the continuous transfer performance of these pcbs!
if i went with Al i was also thinking 1A might give better performance
looks like i’ll have to prepare myself to get a reflow setup for some batches thanks!
Interesting results, are you using the XP-E reflector?
The emitter hole looks kind of big.
What can I say, “good job”. Oh, that’s a nice, sexy black FL.
thanks for testing and posting, very nice results, yet another proof of the immense impact of the copper boards.
Thats a good question. I believe it is an xr-e reflector. I would like to see a slightly tighter hotspot. I am open to suggestions on reflectors as i have very little experience with p-60 lights.
edit: i used this kit https://www.fasttech.com/products/1164600.
Fasttech do an XP-E version, which should focus it even better. I have a red XP-E driven at 1 amp on an aluminium star, and it gets over 150 OTF and good throw. The max spec for XP-E in red is only 700ma I think so I didn’t want to push it anywhere near double that. It’s good to see that on copper it can handle it though.
here’s the bin I used in a triple:
http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/XPERED-L1-R250-00701/XPERED-L1-R250-00701CT-ND/2704526
It’s a P2, but they have the P3 for 86c more (00801).
nice build by the way and great job soldering the sinkpad to the pill, that must help hugely.
I would like to know the proper way to solder a copper sinkpad onto a brass pill. Pics would be great.
solder paste and a propane torch?
I did a vid in my uniquefire uf-t20 mod thread (sorry, no link, I post on my phone now, you'll find it 
), that gives an idea how it can be done (indeed solder paste+propane torch).
I don’t have solder paste, or a propane torch. I was wondering about if I tinned the top of the brass pill and the underside of the copper sinkpad, slathered on a lot of flux, and heated the whole thing up in a frying pan?
that should work just the same, it’ll just be a little fiddlier that’s all. At the end of the day, however you melt the solder to make the join, it’s still solder 
These are the ones I use https://www.fasttech.com/products/1605/10002800/1208506-empty-aluminum-smooth-drop-in-module-for-cree-xp-e
Should give you a tighter hotspot and bit better throw.
Ok, so I’ve been thinking about this, but haven’t figured it out…why does the LED mounted on the copper sinkpad run so much brighter? I can see the improved thermal conductivity keeping temps down, allowing the driver to keep pushing more current as things come to thermal equilibrium. However that does not explain the 2x improvement at cold startup. If the difference is strictly thermal, I would expect both types to start out equally bright, but the copper version to stay brighter longer.
Can somebody hit me with the clue stick?
my hunch is there isn’t really much difference in start up lux. my geuss…the meter isn’t fast enough to respond to the almost instantaneous drop in light output due to high junction temp??? maybe…
This is not exactly what you want but it may help.