Oh yes I did.
It all started a couple months back when I bought one of those mini maglites with the American flag pattern on the exterior. The intention, of course, was to cut it down to a micro mag and install my standard triple emitter stack and drive it to eight amps with a FET driver of some flavor. There was some small inner voice of doubt asking whether it was alright to cut up an American flag in this situation but what really stopped me was that I realized it would look stupid. It’s really the forward part of the battery tube that identifies the flag pattern and if I cut it down I would have a mostly silver tube with a star covered head. Stupid.
So plan B was one of Richard’s buck drivers and a triple but I seriously doubted the driver would function as hot as I drive these so on to plan C. Plan C was completely unreasonable so I wend ahead and put in a quad XP-G3 (S5,3C bin) regulated with one of Richard’s FET+1 drivers in Zener mode to drive the emitters in 2S2P configuration off two high drain 14500s. Here’s the driver.
Here’s the emitters adhered to the heatsink and wired to the driver.
The driver is held in place with my standard micro mag plastic tubing mount.
I only included this pic because it shows the four burn marks in the table from the first rather brief function test outside the flashlight.
The optic needed to be reduced in diameter by 2 mm to fit inside the bezel and the inner diameter of the bezel needed to be opened up by 2mm to allow maximum light passage. Removal of this bezel material also eliminated the lens o-ring groove, gaining a single millimeter of vertical space that was needed to fully screw the bezel down (the legs of the quad optic limit how far it can settle into the head).
The parts are ready to assemble.
I drilled the head to 0.75 inches to fit the heatsink but had to ream the top part a bit wider to accept the quad board. Inserting an 0.75 inch heatsink is a tight enough press fit so it’s not coming out again without damaging parts of the pill assembly. More importantly, thermal contact between heatsink and the head is excellent.
Bezel on and looking good!
The last step is to cut the end off the battery tube and shorten/dress the cut end to work well with the battery height.
The completed light!
The driver features four modes (moon-low-med-high), off time memory, low voltage warning, and a 30 second turbo timer. On fully charged and rested high drain Windyfire 14500 cells the light starts off at over 7 amps and quickly drops to around 6.5 amps where it stabilizes until the turbo timer kicks it down to just under four amps. At this point the head is too hot to touch. Assuming around 75% efficiency in the optics and calculating from testing by Djozz results in around 3500 lumens OTF at 6.5 amps (3.25 per emitter). I’m hoping this is the brightest mini mag to date. Beam shots will need to wait as we’re having a blizzard today.
Happy modding,
Brian
This one’s for Justin, without whom I would be a muggle in the dark.
Thanks for sharing…