New Noctigon M43 - no thermal paste & other issues...

LED Flashlights – General Info 18650 Flashlights
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I got an early sample of the Meteor and as such, it had a fairly normal thermal compound under the large mcpcb that took some cleaning to remove when I modified the light. I’ve never heard of this problem related to this particular light before so it is probably a very rare case, maybe the only one.

For what it’s worth, Banggood is a store, they sell products they buy. They aren’t the assembly line for Manker or Noctigon or whoever. Same for GearBest, although they have built their first light now, the Zanflare F1.

In this particular case, Hank at internationaloutdoor.com is the one that had this Meteor built. I do not know if he assembles them in house or not. It would be a good point to contact him and ask, let him know that this happened, so he can look into it and rectify the situation. Perhaps an individual was perturbed at the end of his/her shift and did it on purpose, ready to take a month off for Spring Holiday. Who knows, but Hank will check into it personally and try to get to the bottom of it as he’s that type of guy.

22

Pretty impressive first post SPL! You obviously know your stuff! Welcome to our community!

23

@Easyrr, and other posters, Thanks,
Reading trough all replies in conjunction with my previous read-up I will just time the drop time from turbo and if that’s good enough indicatining a good heat dispersal just use my m43.

Bought it from what I figure is a good source after read-up on that subject so it should be the real deal.

-lyse99

24

Sh*t! I picked up from the customs office several packages including one of an M43, I have not yet had time to open it

Although it has lowered the price, I hope Hank has not lowered the quality

25

Budget lights are great but I’m glad I have the wherewithal to check them out and fix most issues. The potential is worth the headaches but I don’t recall any that have proven completely headache free, just ones that are difficult to open up and fix(or mod :innocent: ).

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Regarding the comments about an unconventional “Japanese” thermal interface being used, I’d be curious what it is, or any info on it, purely for curiosity’s sake only. I’m quite familiar with all the various ‘modern’ TIMs being used for mass production & hobbyist use, as I’ve spent countless hours spec’ing this stuff out, modeling thermal performance for various bond-line thickness & RMS surface roughness, as well as testing / verifying / validating the design & thermal simulation model in controlled environmental chambers for various consumer & commercial products, etc, etc…

On my sample, there was “something” that was clearly rubbed / cleaned off the head where the leftover residue looked exactly like it does after wiping off a conventional, (metal)oxide impregnated thermal paste from a CPU heat spreader… I’ve used & spec’d more than a few designs implementing some of the fancy ‘phase change’ TIMs for unique commercial applications requiring it for initial production cost & field maintenance reasons; this was & is not the case here.

Regarding some of the other comments, I think the 25 posts in this thread, in only 24 hours, shows just how satisfied the overwhelming majority of folks are with their purchase of the M43 & how well-rounded the actual engineering / design is for a flashlight of this type (which is why I purchased it & chose to fix the manufacturing defects rather than send it back). My intent in posting my findings wasn’t to cause a mass panic, nor cause folks to be dissatisfied with their purchase, just give a heads up for a potentially serious manufacturing flaw that can be fairly easily fixed, & vent a little bit about the other manufacturing issues I found in my sample.

From a few of the comments, it appears one or two folks may have taken my post in a strange way… I purposely differentiated between “Design / Engineering” vs “Manufacturing / Production”; they are not the same, although most consumers confuse the two, or simply choose not to understand the difference when critical analysis is given towards products / brands they are emotionally attached to. It’s good to be skeptical & challenge the legitimacy of what you’re told (especially on the internet), the world needs more of this; however, it is also wise to be cognizant of one’s own biases / distortions / conditioning, especially in areas of high passion :wink:

Again, “Design / Engineering” quality wise, I’m ‘8.5 out of 10’ satisfied with the M43, especially considering the relative “value” price point it now costs. “8.5 out of 10” on my personal scale is a rarity to find in a mass market product; I wouldn’t even rate many of my own consumer product designs this high due to the cost constraints, cultural incompetence (politics), & greediness I had to appease in former work… In a nutshell, no one should feel bad about their purchase of the M43; I really like mine, it’s one of my favorites now that I fixed the manufacturing defects to meet the designer’s engineering specification :wink:

However, it still stands that the “Production / Manufacturing” quality of my sample (i.e. the manufacturing process’s ability to adhere to design / engineering specification) was highly flawed to the point of being completely unacceptable. If it were one single defect alone, I could chalk it up to “Things Happen” & it wouldn’t be much of an issue to me; however, there were 5 separate, unrelated manufacturing quality defects in my sample, which is highly indicative of an overall manufacturing process that is out of control, complacent, & not maintained due to a lack of necessary negative feedback loops. My posting of these manufacturing defects will hopefully be the necessary negative feedback loop to correct these issues. Maybe mine was built at the last hour before Chinese New Year break this year; however, this is still not a justifiable excuse if quality is of any concern to the manufacturer…

Thanks for the warm welcome folks. I’ve lurked on here the past 5 or so years, & CPF for about 8 years. I’ve built lots of lights, modded plenty of mass produced ones too; finally had something that irked me enough to sign up, so here I am :slight_smile:

27

Sounds like a serious lemon.

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OK, so finally here are some facts on the M43 from Hank: (source: Fonarevka )

“thermal paste which we use, is made in Japan - ShinEtsu 7783. It does not contain fat (dry) Other types of thermal paste to glue, have low thermal conductivity…

People who are not familiar with this type of thermal paste, may think that it is not on the pill, and it is not true. The image with a clean and fluff thermal grease options attached”

Picture

So it’s a special paste after all, on a normal production sample it’s there but barely visible.

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Just might have to try some of this! https://www.shinetsu.co.jp/en/

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I’m not familiar with other facts, but for the M43, the turbo mode will not run more than 2 minutes before the 50 Celsius degree temperature kicks in.
For example, I’m living in the 8 Celsius degree environment here, the 50 Celsius degree kicks in about 1 minute and 30 seconds after the turbo mode is on.
For the “4 minutes” kicking in time, it’s either a defective driver, or the high mode is running instead of turbo mode, or the batteries are not powerful
enough to support the turbo mode, because if it’s really 4 minutes kicking in time for the turbo mode, it’s simply can not be fixed by the user,
adding more thermal paste does not make any difference.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

31

Well,
I will do some pure speculation in this post, not really worth that much but here it goes.

As far as I know there is one m43 that been discovered and claimed to have this manufacturing neglects.

That particular m43 did get purchased by someone that have a very deep knowledge even into the manufacturing/assembly of flashlights.

Fact is (for the moment?) a decent price cut on the m43, is this price drop due to a new deal/factory for assembly/manufacturing of this light leaving the previous place frustrated and angry for loosing the business or is it just a temporary new year price cut?

I now personally with no vested interest other than as a customer would love to here this Hank fellow or a representant make a comment on this because not knowing and speculations are never a good thing.

It will also be interesting to see if more m43’s do show up with similar problems that could indicate a swap to worse manufacturing conditions.

Also if this is (if more similar do surface) is connected to the currently “low priced” m43’s sold.

Last,
Just some speculations/thoughts.

-lyse99

32

More thermal paste does not help with anything. The only purpose of thermal paste is to eliminate pockets of air between 2
surfaces, to completely remove air, because air is actually a thermal insulator.
Thermal pastes have poor thermal transfer rates (when compared to those of the metals used in the MCPCB and Alloy used for the host), however air simply isolates thermally in tiny pockets, so you can accept the paste’s poor transfer as colossal better than the air’s insulation.

33

One thing to note is that the common one minute and a half before stepping down from turbo is for the standard “unattended” turbo, where stepdown occurs at 50 degrees Celsius. SPL15 is using the “press and hold turbo” where the stepdown occurs at 70 degrees Celsius. Although it’s only a 20 degrees difference, more energy dissipate at higher temperature, so 4 minutes is maybe plausible. Whether it’s ok for the M43 is a totally different question, as mentioned in the first post…

34

Ok, even it’s “press and hold”, the step down can not occur at 4 minutes time, think about from 8 degree to 50 degree takes 1.30 minutes, from 50 degree to 70 degree, it takes 2.5 minutes?
Still, if it’s 4 minutes step down time, it should be the reasons I said above, no relationship with the quantity of the thermal paste, and it can not fixed by the user by
putting more thermal paste.
Maybe SPL15 is living in an extremely cold area which I have never experienced.

35

Extremely cold is extremely bad for cell performance!
Unrelated to his location or experience, look at the graph below and see how much temperature affects cell perfomance. Even when it heats up due to being used it still does not perform close to when there is a higher ambient temperature (take the –10C discharge curve). That is only 4A, still a decent current load on a cell.
From 25C and –10C is night and day difference in cell performance.

36

That’s exactly my point. Regardless of ambient temperature being 8 degrees or 20 degrees, it takes relatively more time for temperature to increase from 50 to 70 degrees, than it takes from 30 to 50 degrees, although deltaT is the same 20 degrees. The reason being is that you have more heat dissipating into air at higher temperature (=cooling) than at lower temperature.
The initial thought was that 4 minutes is way too long due to absence of thermal grease. However, personally, I’m not 100% convinced that 4 minutes until stepdown is a result of some flaw (either lack of thermal grease or driver).

Edit: P.S. Welcome to BLF Sahala!

37

… You know… engineers are humans too… with emotions… and not robots…

38

SPL, did you take any pics or videos of the faults/ non-existent thermal paste?

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EDIT: Guess my Flickr links aren’t wanting to share its goods, if you click on where the photo should be, it’ll take you to the actual photo though.

Faint thermal paste residue visible on head, none on bottom of MCPCB. The Shin Etsu paste purportedly used is a conventional, (metal)oxide impregnated, silicone carrier based one, and thus relies upon wetting action of the surfaces to actually work…

Stripped screw heads for Left & Bottom screws; can’t really see in the photo that they are also tilted & cross threaded as well (Cross threaded screws are pretty tough to screw in, thus the stripped heads)… These have been replaced with stainless cap head screws & the corresponding MCPCB holes slightly elongated to line up with the holes in the battery carrier. Also, the entire negative plate is shifted towards the bottom screw to the point the MCPCB edge is touching the battery housing. You can see a gap in the far side (top most screw). Not a big deal in itself, but shows that the screw hole locations are not exactly where they should be (could be either the location of the negative plate’s screw holes, or the battery carrier screw holes).

Driver contact patch on the right side; MUCH better than it was initially. In order to get this much contact, I wet sanded down the edge of the battery tube slightly in that area. As received, it was only about a 3/8” long scuff in the copper, even tightening the head down as hard as I could.

Battery carrier contact patch on the bottom side.

What looks to be a solder ding on one of the LED domes. Would be a much bigger issue if it were a single LED light; it’s annoying & shouldn’t be there, but any negative effect it has is likely swamped by the fact that there are 11 other LEDs…

Carclo 10507 optic with defect in PC reflector. Obviously an issue with the injection molding process; looks like the mold wasn’t hot enough at this injection port (which is also kind of gnarly in the post injection cutting), causing a slight fold / wrinkle in the underside of the reflector. Obviously not the M43’s manufacturer’s fault, as they do not produce them; I could see how this would slip through the cracks at the flashlight manufacturer though.