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Hey all,

So recently I was thinking my astrolux didn’t throw far enough :smiley: totally valid right? So well I thought I would give dedoming a shot.

I read a lot about dedoming and came to the conclusion that a gas soak would be easiest for me. So I removed the led from my light and let it soak in gasoline for a night.
The next day I looked and the dome was still on… ugh. Nevertheless I was impatient enough to try and remove the dome from the led anyway, thinking it had been in its bath for long enough.

Result:

I broke all the bonding wires…. all of em. :cry:

Also tore some phosphor from the led:

I found that the dome hadn’t weakened at all, so I probably used the wrong kind of gas. It did seem like the dome had detached from the led a bit, but because it was still so structurally sound the bonding wires were stuck in it.

Anyway, since I kinda failed already, I thought I would try something even dumber. Soldering the bonding wires back to the board.
I was lucky enough to have the bonding wires still stuck to the middle part thing (i’m lacking in led terminology :wink: ).

Results:

It ain’t the prettiest, but guess what:

IT FREAKING WORKS!!

So yea, I will be trying this led out in the light itself. But I will also order another led just because I’m not 100% happy with this.
But for a first ever dedome, I’d say I did pretty ok.

(btw I filmed the soldering part: Youtube )

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update: led just died lol

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if its any help SST-40 Dedomed

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Good effort! Especially with resoldering the bond wires.

Different LEDs need different techniques for dedoming, and working methods are not known for all of them.
Gas/petrol works on some of the older Cree LEDs but is not known to work on the SST-40, i believe for the reason you found out that the bond wires get damaged in the removal process.

You can buy dedomed SST-40s from KaiDomain, and while i really like the tint it is very cool and on the greener side of white.

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Brave attempt! I managed re-soldering bondwires once (worked but in the end I used a different led for the flashlight build) and I can tell you that your result looks very pretty!

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Thanks, I knew there were commercial ones out there, but I wanted to give dedoming a shot. I bought some non-dedomed leds from KD just now to try again haha :smiley:

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Fair play to you for trying… i’ve not had masses of success tend to slice instead

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yikes, there isn’t that much info on dedoming sst40’s so I feared something like that might be the case.

I still have the intact dome, so i’ll try dumping it in some solvents and see what melts it :smiley:

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Does it have as much an effect (or close enough) as taking the dome off completely? You can’t really go super low since you’d slice the wires…

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thanks man! I had it looking cleaner at first, but then I had to go and try to add more solder…

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To be honest ive found there to be little difference and the beam tends to be a fair bit cleaner less chance of artifacts , also the tint shift is less dramatic , i use a very sharp razor blade and slice as close as i dare , try to do it in one pass so you get a clean cut , i get about a 95% success rate but make sure the emitter surface is clean after any dirt from the blade and you will have a smoker

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Why?