Awhile ago I bought one of those $25 Trustfire 3T6 lights from Amazon and took a tailcap reading tonight. With 3xSamsung 2800mAh purple pack-pull cells (charged to 4.15v) it pulls 550mA. So that’s a little under seven watts shared between 3 emitters, am I right? My Trustfire X9, with a 3040mA Nanjg, is getting over 12 watts to the emitter.
Either I’m missing something here or the driver in this 3T6 is garbage. I’ve read it’s possible that these 3T6’s are not genuine Trustfire. This light is fairly bright, it just seems like a 3 XM-L light should be…brighter.
I doubt I can mod this particular driver. The resistors are a bit too small for me to be confident soldering on extras and there’s no room to add a trimpot. The SST-50 driver Fasttech sells is the right diameter but is too deep for the pill, and anyway is capped at 8.4v. I found a 26mm driver on Lightscastle that would fit and purports to give the emitter/s 15 watts (17v, 880mA), but again, it’s max input voltage is 8.4v. Does anyone sell a properly powerful driver that will fit inside the 3T6’s pill that will take 13v input?
Thanks for the time. Perhaps I’m tired but my google-fu is weak tonight.
How are the emitters wired? If they are series I think that will fit a DRY driver from Fancy Flashlights. I modded one once with a DRY driver and it rocked.
That driver does look nice (and the turbo mode makes my wedding vegetables tingle. A mini-TK-75 is a fun idea), but it’s a 23mm driver, and the pill has a 26mm unit.
A few of them, and none terribly specific on how to mount it. So far the best suggestion I’ve seen is to get some copper pipe, split/spread/press it into the receptacle to provide a pedestal for the driver and then somehow fit a new retaining ring, but it’s one of those ‘easier said than done’ scenarios, especially on fitting a new retaining ring.
Aside from being more than half the cost of the light itself and 3x the cost of the DRY, does this driver have any downsides? It looks like it would drop right in place of the old driver and is rated at 20 watts.
And what is DRY exactly? is DRY a brand or a type?
The 3T6 that I received from Amazon was wired in series, not parallel. It ran fine off of 4 AA eneloops (but only medium power), 2 18650, or 3 18650.
Sorry, the pictures aren’t very good because I snapped them real quick with my cell phone as I was taking it apart a few weeks ago. (note the unintentional dedome… oops!) J)
What is going in: DRY Driver (still working on shimming it, I may end up using split brass ring pieces)
It is amazing how well the stock driver works… between 3.6-13+ volts.
The length isn’t a problem for me, and mine are wired in series as well.
This pill isn’t deep enough. If I could take 2mm off the top edge of that vertical board then it would work, but as it stands this pill is just too shallow to take that driver.
It might be a little messy, but I am going to try and split open and solder a few of these rings around the outside of the driver. I will probably end up making it a snug fit so that I don’t have to use the factory retaining ring. They are pretty soft and easy to work with.
That looks like it could work. I’ll reserve my mouse button until I see how it works for you, but for what the DRY promises I’ll keep it on the front burner. One might not even need more than one, especially for the 16/17mm rings you linked, if it adds one mm per side it could theoretically still socket onto the pedestal the original driver rested on. Any mounting solution needs to retain a way of removing the driver.
It has to be either a clone or a manufacturer downgrade, the latter of which I doubt as Trustfire seems to be the only ‘good’ cheap light company in China.
I’ll try later today. Like I said though, there aren’t any big resistors, they’re all small ones, and I’m not sure I can solder that fine. And the toroid has to be removed to get to things anyway. And now that I’ve been shown the DRY I really do want it. :3
Werner, comparing mine to the pics in DMWalking’s thread, my light’s pill has no large spring, and the threading is down on the part of the pill where DMWalking’s has those two concentric rings.
Go to the hardware store and get some assorted sizes of copper pipe, and a tubing cutter. 3/4" pipe is especially useful for all kinds of things like extending pills. Cut off a ring, slit it vertically into a 'C' shape, expand or shrink to fit. And of course, you can solder stuff to it.
This driver is officially trash. I put the Eneloops back in and it’s locked into low-med-low for some reason. With the three li-ions at 3.94v each, it draws 200mA. My 500-lumen P60 is brighter.
I’m buying that DRY driver before I go to class. Does CN Quality Goods automatically get city from zip code?
Bought! Next update in three weeks, mebbe sooner. Or later if I have trouble finding a way to mount the driver in the pill.
BTW…I’ll be using unprotected Panasonic 2800mAh or Sanyo 2200mAh cells, both will be laptop pulls, how will they handle being sucked-down at 4 amps in direct drive?
They will run it great. If you went too crazy like samsung 20amp batteries and heavy gauge wire you could do much better but then you would have to change the emitters out to something direct copper or they would go poof.
The thing to do it to always charge them up before using and make sure not to run them too long, monitor them with a multimeter or at least stop using them when the light starts to get dimmer. Drain a unprotected battery to nothing and it’s dead for good. Also if you drain them too low and repeatedly charge them it’s dangerous. Crystals build up inside them and they become unstable.
So they are great to run the light on just be safe with them.
Also… draining too low with unprotected batteries (especially older cells) in series can be dangerous if one cell is much weaker than the others. Reverse charge baby! J) I run unprotected cells in series myself, but I am cognizant of the potential risks.
From Wikipedia:
“In the latter case, the problem occurs due to the different cells in a battery having slightly different capacities. When one cell reaches discharge level ahead of the rest, the remaining cells will force the current through the discharged cell. This is known as ”cell reversal”. Many battery-operated devices have a low-voltage cutoff that prevents deep discharges from occurring that might cause cell reversal. Cell reversal can occur to a weakly charged cell even before it is fully discharged. If the battery drain current is high enough, the cell’s internal resistance can create a resistive voltage drop that is greater than the cell’s forward emf. This results in the reversal of the cell’s polarity while the current is flowing.[3][4] The higher the required discharge rate of a battery, the better matched the cells should be, both in kind of cell and state of charge, in order to reduce the chances of cell reversal.” Original Wiki Page
