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
That’s the worst I’ve ever seen
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?
Maybe adding some spacers below the lens or mcpcb and try to fine tune the beam, other than that I am not sure.
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
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!
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.
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 ?
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.
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
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.
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!
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).
Bloody auto spell checker I did type XSearcher !
EDIT. Pic of a XSearcher next to a UF-1508
Have you got a link for the Thorfire 75mm lens? I looked but could not find anything.
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.
Thanks!!
I had a reply e-mail from Shezchan Homesafety this morning about the original stock drivers in the UF-1508.
IF the driver is a single mode driver then it is good for up to 3 series (12volt), the three mode drivers are for 2 series (8.4v) only
Might be useful info for someone in future.
When I started on this ‘tower project’ I initially ordered a Single UF-1508 from Amazon…a ‘local’ European supplier. I then ordered direct from alibaba and Shezan HomeSafety in China.
The chinese order arrived within 5 days, then the replacement parts also arrived within 5 days…and 15 days later i was still waiting for the ‘local’ parts to arrive.
Well the Amazon order arrived yesterday…lens also broken. umm am I just unlucky or does the cosmos just want me to receive broken think through the post…or I have a dodgy postman!!
Inside the 75mm head, the lens sits on an ‘o’ ring. Well it is supposed to , but the groove for the ring is too deep, so the ring disappears into the groove and the lens sits on the metal ridge.
Ummm . well 2 minutes on the lathe sorted that out. Yes you can grip the head, although it is angled, in the lathe chuck and get a tool inside to machine off the height off the rim. need to take off about 0.75mm. 1mm is too much as I discovered and the ring only just sits in place and needed superglueing in. I had three heads to play with so no issue.
Also yesterday my mates Searcher arrived
The XSearcher did not last long enough to test its beam pattern. It arrived in the morning he went home to collect it, and before it was dark, the pill has died. It was putting out light during the day, but while trying to get to grips with the ‘twist for single or triple mode’ selection…it went off then failed to come on again.
Tested the switch…it is good, tested the supplied protected batteries, they work in my UF-1508.
But the pill is dead, tried applying g8.4 volts direct to it …and nada…dead as a dodo within about 3 hour of unpacking it. E-mail sent to supplier
Here are some pics
Size of head
Hidden ’o’ring
After machine work, O ring can now support the lens
1 2 or 3 cells
Next to the Nightmaster XSearcher
Mine arrived a couple of days ago, haven’t had a chance to try the new lens but I’ll update when I do. I see what you mean about the O-ring, that lathe clamping though, I don’t think I have the balls to try that. That being said I might have to, this lens is thicker. I’m thinking instead of just gripping that thin edge I would 3D print up a “collet” that fits in all those grooves. If somebody buys one of these without a lathe I would suggest just putting something like some solid copper wire in the bottom of the O-ring groove to space it up. The lens that came with mine is surprisingly good, much better than my 1405, seems like it’s all down to luck of how new the mold was when it made. Going to throw an LED in it soon so see what it will do, stock is pretty terrible, like 118kcd.