Anyone disassembled Niteye MSA20?

[wight]

@ohaya

@Helios-

Nice! Glad it worked out.
Hate when things require any level of destruction to disassemble.

Hi,

Thanks to you all for sticking with me on this. It was a pain, and several times, I was “that close” to trashing the light (recall it was brand new). I am SO glad that it’s working again now.

Jim

Redemption!

[ohaya]

@Helios-

Yea… I was thinking thats a really nice new light…
But with new lights I always have a great urge to disassemble & look for places for improvement. Oh, just a little prying. Hmm, a little more. :~ Time for larger pliers. …… Where is my blowtorch?

I hate glue.

Yes, it (the MSA20) is really a nice light. The control ring works well, and it’s nice having the ramping low mode.

I’m surprised that it’s not noticed more, and actually I can say the same for Niteye, in general. I have 4 different Niteye lights now, but I rarely hear anything about them.

EDIT: We were all out last night with out kids (and their kids) for 4th of July fireworks, and I had the MSA20 with me (w/1x14500 and 1 dummy battery), and I was amazed at how bright and throwy (with quite a lot of spill) the light was, even with the OP reflector! In high mode, I was able to light up our entire driveway from our garage to the street very brightly. The head got a little warm but not too hot to touch.

This seems to be a somewhat underrated light to me.

[ohaya]

Hi,

I got an MSA10 and MSC10 from IS this week (yes, I like the lights!), so I’m planning to also replace the wires and the emitter with XM-L2s, but I don’t want to go through what I did last time and risk damaging the driver.

So, I’m (still) looking for how to get the driver out?

From the earlier posts, it is definitely glued in, and not screwed into the head at all. So is the only way to get the driver out to poke something through the emitter wire holes and pound it out like I did with the MSA20?

Is that really the way that Niteye designed these?

[wight]

@ohaya

Hi,

I got an MSA10 and MSC10 from IS this week (yes, I like the lights!), so I’m planning to also replace the wires and the emitter with XM-L2s, but I don’t want to go through what I did last time and risk damaging the driver.

So, I’m (still) looking for how to get the driver out?

From the earlier posts, it is definitely glued in, and not screwed into the head at all. So is the only way to get the driver out to poke something through the emitter wire holes and pound it out like I did with the MSA20?

Is that really the way that Niteye designed these?

Depending on the glue strength there may be another option. You can gently (no overtemp or prolonged heat!) solder something onto the bottom of the driver, then use that to rip it out. This method carries with it the risk of tearing the traces off the bottom of the board though…

[ohaya]

Hi,

I ended up taking a chance (or two chances) and just did the reflows in-place, and both of them worked ok. The one thing I did differently this time was that I put the head on top of a large chunk of copper before I started heating the emitter up with the heatgun. I’m conjecturing that the copper chunk absorbed some of the heat and prevented the solder joints on the driver board from melting this time.