A Perfect Dedome?

I put it near the air intake of the ventilation system in the bathroom. :slight_smile:

Excellent contribution my friends, today eh dedomado 2 leds XP-G2 with gasoline, in 7 hours approximately the dome was removed, but I was left with silicone between the 2 cables and try to remove it with a toothpick and damage the led :kiss: , how to remove those remains? Or should I leave them?

Thank you

A vote here for MEK, if you have access to it.

Cut a couple of slices into the dome of an XM-L2:

Dunked upside down in MEK for about 2 hours, until the majority of the dome just fell off:

Finally, cleaned excess residue with a toothpick. As MEK evaporates quickly, I re-immersed for a couple of minutes to soften the rest of the residue then finished off with the toothpick.

And yes, it still works :smiley:

Is that butanone? Methyl-Ethyl-Ketone?

Cheers ^:)

Good to know, but i don’t know where to get it.

I do that too to speed things up a bit :slight_smile:

Are you seriously using 200+ cm³ (0.2 Liter) of that hazardous stuff for a dedome??
5 cm³ is more than enough.

Yup, that’s the one.

Much to my surprise you can buy it from Amazon or eBay in the UK…don’t know about your part of the world though.

The jar is smaller than it looks, there’s about 60ml in there.

I’m a chemist, so by my standards MEK isn’t really that hazardous :stuck_out_tongue:

Finally got the courage to try this on an XM-L2. I am using odorless mineral spirits. You can get it at home depot, OSH and Lowes here in the states for ~$8-9 for a small bottle. I am a backpacker + camping enthusiast and this stuff readily dissolves and mixes with GE silicone. The mineral spirits is used as a thinner for clear silicone. You mix the two to create a runny, paint-able silicone product. You then brush it over tent and tarp seams to improve water resistance.

I trimmed the silicone off the corners of the led, a little too aggressively… Not sure if I needed to do this. I figure it should speed up the process…. ???

I’ll report back the results in a few hours….

MEK can be sourced almost anywhere at paint stores; it’s a commonly used epoxy thinner. The vapors are strong and can melt or mar plastics like countertops. They’re also very highly flammable. The liquid is a poison which will enter your bloodstream through skin contact. This is very potent stuff so treat it accordingly :wink: Sometimes you can find MIK (methyl isobutyl ketone) which is slightly stronger.

For the “motorheads’ out there this stuff is better than ”carb dip” at cleaning metals, eating up the whitish corrosion found on the alloys of carburetor bodies that the dip can’t handle, and leaving a factory fresh surface finish behind. An overnight or 24 hour dunking can produce miraculous results. Metal only- any plastic or rubber you forget to remove will not be there in the morning. As always watch the progress and stop as soon as you have the results you want- I’ve heard unconfirmed rumors that it can actually eat up the cheapest zinc alloys if left soaking too long :open_mouth:

Phil

I guess i over reacted a little…
But still it’s nasty stuff though, and 60 ml is also quite a lot i.m.o.

You’re probably right, I just added enough to the jar to make it easy to suspend the wire support in it.

As long as you have decent ventilation, gloves and stay away from naked flames, there’s minimal risk.
I should really have added that to my post though. Those things are standard procedure for me, but I forget that’s not the case for most people.

FWIW odorless mineral spirits DOES NOT WORK. I posted Saturday, its now Monday morning and the LED dome is rock solid. Its like I just soaked it in water.

Not sure why Mineral Spirits would even be considered? Gas has been so well proven, but there's some XPL's it can't do well. There are other better options - high grade racing fuel, and the ZEP AeroSolve II I bought off of eBay - see post #614 here.

What are the potential improvements for an XHP70 M4 4000K CRI80+?

Cheers ^:)

OK thanks… I was just hoping it would work since I have tons of it already and use it to dilute Silicone. I was only ~half expecting it to work.

I did my first dedome in 95 octan E10 Gas, yesterday

the scratch on the negative side is from a cut in the dome to give the gas a point to get below the dome

I ran the XPG2 at 2.5W on a 10mm sinkpad, the dome popped off, after a couple of minutes,
but there was still a relatively thick part stick to the phosphor that didnt come off with a qtip

So I let it run over an hour at 1.5W and could peel off the remaining parts with a qtip covered in gas.

Finally today I took some car 2K clear lacquer to seal the phosphor

photo is with fresh lacquer that needs to dry

dryed

now trying on a sliced XHP70

Interested to see how it goes. I haven’t seen anyone try to dedome a XHP70 yet, only dome shaving.

De-domed quite a few XHP70’s and 50’s and now 35’s and… :smiley:

the phosphor layer gets slightly discolored by the gas,
the silicone dome gets larger but not soft goo

after 45 mins I stopped thinking of a totally failure and took the dome off,
unfortunately still some phosphor sticked to it,
maybe longer in gas and all of the dome gets loose from the phosphor

the material of the dome is different from XML2 or XPG2 LEDs




Don't ditch it yet, Lexel. You may want to try MEK (butanone) on it, to see how it goes before a full attempt.

Cheers ^:)