2x UF-1508's arrived, both broken. PICS AND 'COMMENTS' ADDED

LED Flashlights – General Info 18650 Flashlights
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I rushed home today, between jobs, as I knew DHL were delivering two UF-1508’s this morning.

On opening the box, all looked good. Not the best packaging, but nothing to inducate the package had been abused.

I powered them up and heard ‘noises’
inside as I moved them.

Both had the same issue of the edge of the glass lenses being crushed and shattered with loose glass fragments within the head,

Looks very much like a design issue, the glass edge being screwed down on to by the bezel, with no seal/buffer/ padding between glass and metal.

Both lamps had the 75 mm heads
Orderd via alibaba.com direct from the manufacturer, Shenzhen Homesafety Electronic Co.

Have sent them an e-mail to see what if anything they
will do.

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They’ve had problems with those, e.g. this report:

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  • Yes, I read that, or some of, that post. The glass on these is in no way sealed, it is just glass against metal, with no internal 'O' rings or collars to support the glass. The brass pull units are nice though. A screw in collar to hold both the driver and the LED star Beam pattern has horrendous rings though. There is no reflector in the head, but there is a bloody great step inside it, that you would not be able to turn out with a lathe, as the external fins are too deep.

Edit..in daylight I can see that there is an o ring to seat the glass on..but it is too small, too deep in a groove so servers no purpose

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Well
Good and bad news

Good news is that Ruby from Shenzhen Homesafety Electronic Co has already replied to my e-mail and will send out two new lenses.

Bad news is that the beam pattern is utter crap. I can’t seem to access my FTP server from the phone, so can’t upload till later, but there is a vaguely focused LED square, which is not perfect since lens alingment is out. But there are two huge rings and black areas, even on a wall 6foot away , the largest is about 3 foot wide.

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All shots quickly grabbed with the iPhone.

Beam shots at 2 o’clock this morning
Standard OEM LED with dome

Pointless O ring that is too small to touch the glass.

Poor iPhone Beam shots

At my feet on grass.

On a wall 6 foot away, maximum flood

On a wall 6 foot away, maximum zoom

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That’s the worst I’ve ever seen

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And I have bought three of these P.oS !

Don’t think there is anything that can be done to make that a decent beam?? is there?

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Maybe adding some spacers below the lens or mcpcb and try to fine tune the beam, other than that I am not sure.

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I had hoped I could have machined out the head, to make a smooth sloped wall all the way down to the pill, rather than the cylinder at the start and then the big step but they have cut the fins on the outside to deep, so doing that would make the head fall off!..see pics further on.

The pills are nice though. with a threaded collar to hold both the driver (alloy collar) and start with a hard plastic collar.
Alloy collar has 8mm diameter hole, so difficult to use with a driver that has components on the spring side.
Pill has 8mm depth below the driver board seat

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One red, one white emitter.
Ordered the Cree XML…not sure if that was what was sent or not though.
Not measured LED current, but tail cap current with one cell is 1.25 amps and two cells 0.9 amps

I have not stripped open a white pill yet. I do not want to risk F…ing them up , till I have new stars and drivers for the red pills, which I bought only to strip apart and rebuild.

Star and driver both seem to be 17 mm…Could potentially be 16…not got the vernier out yet…this was just checked with a tape measure


Paper cover over the star

The red single power level driver. Ruby from UniquireFire tells me this driver is good for 3 series (12 volt). All their single mode drivers are good for 12 volt, where as the 3 mode drivers are only up to 2 series 8.4 volt

There is 8mm depth in the pill for the driver so drivers with bigger inductors would fit depth wise, but since the securing ring has a tight 8mm hole in it, any driver with components on that side will need to be well away from the edge to allow the driver securing ring to fit

The white driver is high/lower/ strobe. Talked about in this thread


Switch spring has brass block/pin, not connected in any way. I guess a solder bridge here and flex wire to the switch would help if I try and push the current.


Can remove the extension and run with a single 18650 is needed. I wonder if I can find a driver to run three or 4 x 18650’s I have enough extension tubes…I bought three of these 1508’s

Pill fully fitted…regular threading direction

Pill on first thread

As you can see the pill has groves around it and is not a tight fit in the housing….Well it is when fully tightened, but there is no, or very little heat transfer between the brass pill sides and the alloy housing. I guess you could fill with heat sink compound?

A big step and parallel section inside the head, but this could not be turned out on a lathe as the fins are cut too deep externally. I was wondering about this as I though maybe this step is helping cause the rings in the beam pattern?

Screwed in just enough… for max zoom position.Slightly longer would be better. Might be possible to machine the pill to seat a bit deeper, and machine the bezel allow the lens to sit further away.but only by I guess a max of 1-2mm.

It would be possible machine off two of the fins in the pic below, between the tweeters, to allow the head to be screwed in further towards the LED to give a better flood which is very poor.

I bought two of these identical . Pictured here, one on Max zoom and one on max flood.
I do have a third one on order from a local UK supplier…but it has not arrived yet… 4 days for two to arrive from Chine, and over 10 days now and the one I ordered from Amazon UK has still not arrived!

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Well this is all a bit disappointing, I have one of these on the way, guess we’ll see how lucky I get on the lens damage department. If the rings are caused by those steps some type of aperture could probably help or just making them more black. Maybe this won’t be the nice 75mm host I was looking for.

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It, may well be a crap quality lens too.

I tried just a moment ago with the lens housing off and just holding the lens in front of the LED…… Rings still there … crap glass lens I think

Wonder if better glass can be found ?

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Yeah my experience with UF lenses is they are pretty bad but what can you expect from such a low price point, I actually wasn’t planning on using the lens anyway (but it would be nice to have intact for some other project maybe). The lenses being a standard 75mm size are easy to find although I don’t know about exact fit since many industrial lenses don’t have lips. Guess we’ll see, I already have a 75mm AR coated Thorlabs lens ready to go. I also have another possible host if this one doesn’t work out.

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What sort of price and where did you get your lens?

Let us know if it fits, maybe some sort of collar can be used with it and the original bezel

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You can buy the lenses from Thorlabs, but they are not exactly cheap. That being said they are flawless, beautiful, AR coated lenses. When they have them in stock optolife has lenses at much better prices although I’ve never tried one so don’t know the quality, I would guess quite a bit better than the super cheap lenses included with the stock lights though.

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Well on trying to go budget, I have already spent more than if I had just bought an Searcher for £150. and I still have a pile of junk…

Beginning to think if you want to mod a light…first start with a good one and make it better rather than a PoS and try and make it good!

Have just fitted one of the spare red pills with a de domed XM L2 on a 10mm MCPCB with a 3 amp NLITE driver,
Alos de domed the other red LED one of the originals.)

Am off out tonight to a black tie event, but will try and get some beam shots when I get back if I am not too drunk!

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Yeah it’s always tricky, you just never know what you are going to get when buying a cheap light. It’s all down to how well they were designed, there is no reason a light can’t be made cheaply materials, machining, etc wise and still be good. Uniquefire though tends to be middle of the road design wise, certainly no Convoy but better than some others. By Searcher I assume you mean a Deerelight Xsearcher, having handled one quite a bit I can say their quality and design is certainly much better than UF. That being said comparing the lens quality side by side to my UF-1405 it’s only a little better, still a long way off from an optics grade lens and I would say actually noticeably worse than a Jaxman lens. You can still easily see flaws and waves with the naked eye. There just aren’t a lot of options for real high performance aspherics though, they are either crazy money for good performance (DEFT), expensive for meh performance (Deerelight) or cheap for “it has to be modded to be worth anything” performance (Uniquefire). And to be honest when it comes down to it host quality doesn’t do that much if you can get it together, focused and tweaked. A single LED small die thrower doesn’t have the thermal loads of a a similarly sized and multi-large emitter light and an OK lens to a great lens doesn’t buy you that much. Even with it’s pretty bad lens my UF-1405 is pushing 500kcd (around 490 with driver but will do 500 easily from a benchtop PSU, just need a driver tweak, 550 if you blast it into thermal overload briefly).

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Bloody auto spell checker I did type XSearcher !

EDIT. Pic of a XSearcher next to a UF-1508

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Have you got a link for the Thorfire 75mm lens? I looked but could not find anything.

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Oh that’s because I’m stupid and typo’ed that, see this is what happens when Chinese companies put fire at the end of every word in the dictionary. Corrected, link to lenses.

https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=3835

But like I said I have no idea if it will fit yet, the lip mounting might be a serious issue. The edge of the Thorlabs lens is quite thick.