Thanks. I already have two though (one E14 and one S41)… both are basically identical. Don’t think I need a third.
I do like the optic though. If Banggood started selling bare stars in addition to bare optics, I’d buy some.
Also, despite the E14/S41 not being perfect, I actually quite like this light. It has a lot of things going for it. It’s also somewhat unique. There are lots of triples around, but quads… not so much.
I didn’t have an 18350 battery (still on the way), but I did get my 18650 tube today about a week after the light and this thing is truly amazing. I don’t think any company that ever heard of a lawsuit would produce something like this, so it is great to have this amazing hotrod for this price. That said, it is so floody and so bright that it is like holding a lightbulb in your hand (maybe temperature wise too) and that isn’t incredibly useful. But the lower modes are quite usable and and I love the CRI of the Nichias. I had been thinking about getting the Sportac triple P60 drop-in, but this came out for about the same price and with a way better driver so why not?
Yeah, the execution cudda been a lil better but Manker/ Astrolux :+1:
Fun, ain’t it? 
Welcome to my world. I have around 100 small lights that act big, many that make more power than this little hot rod. I just today built a 7200 lumen X6. Let’s talk about HEAT! (It’ll do over 5200 lumens on 2 18350’s…)
Careful though, it’s highly addictive stuff!
True. But even with flawed execution I give them an “A” for effort. I don’t see anyone else producing hotrodded lights with custom parts like this for this kind of price.
I think if they come out with a Rev2 of this light they could pretty easily fix the problems.
The light is good( i got several already) but the driver sux great time, all the BLF drivers that i`ve recieved in those Astrolux/BLF flashlgiths made in China have issues: especialy the tiny25 based one
About Astrolux S41: i would suggest that one should swap the driver caps asap - Mouser ones are okay, the best ones are Samsung
why / which?
Incidentally, the H17F driver fits perfectly in this light. The stock retaining ring had no trouble clearing the 7135 chips on the driver.
That is very good to know. Thanks!
Interesting point Sharpie. However, your request for a thermocouple and graph is pointless.
I don’t consider turbo mode on a light like this (or my tiny hotrodded modded lights) to be usable for more than a few minutes at a time at most. These lights simply do not have the mass to dissipate the kind of heat that these cells, drivers and emitters can generate. Goal isn’t to allow the light to run on turbo until the “battery runs down”. Rather it’s to allow to to run for more than 15 seconds without burning your hand.
On my sugru-insulated DQG: I didn’t wrap the entire head in Sugru: I just put it over the button and in the indented area where the body meets the head. These were problem areas that made it difficult to hold the light for more than 15 seconds or so. The Sugru fixed that. Plenty of heat still gets out through the rest of the head.
I’d also never advocate tailstanding lights like this in turbo. If it’s on turbo it should be in your hand so you get instant feedback on when it’s too hot and when it’s time to turn it down.
Honestly, I don’t really like the idea of the outside of the light being close to the same temperature of the back of the star. This is where the pill-less copper design of the S41 has issues. Is this an efficient method of getting heat out of the light? Sure. But is it a safety hazard that could cause serious burns if someone accidentally touched that portion of the light? Yes… and that is the problem.
Perhaps there should be a plastic safety cage around the copper section. That would allow it to get hot and vent heat while reducing the chance of getting burned.
Put another way:
In my opinion, turbo in a light is more useful if I can run it for 2 minutes and then wait 3 minutes for the light to cool than if I can only run it for 15 seconds even if it only takes 15 seconds to cool. It’s a weird situation where I’ve found less-efficient heat transfer from the LEDs actually make for a more useful turbo.
Really liking my modded H17F.
Wonder if I should get another and try some more ambitious mods on it. Some ideas:
Sideswitch mod:
18500 mod:
Not sure which of us isn’t getting it.
I got my S41 today. Real nice little light
This is the XP-G2 version, and it can really throw out some light. Got 7A tail reading with a purple Efest 18350.
As far as heat goes, about what I expected. I don’t know about this 15 second and too hot to handle stuff though. Maybe I’m just used to hot rodded direct drive lights with big chunks of copper, an my gnarly hands aren’t as sensitive to heat.
It behaved as it should and warmed up quick. After about forty seconds the light kicked down a notch. It was never uncomfortably hot. I could hold it just fine. I let it run for about two minutes before there was some good heat and turned it off. I mean, this is a DD hot rod on turbo, not strolling through the woods light. One to two minutes is a long time. Most general tasks would not take that long. Looking for dropped car keys, trying to find something that rolled under the workbench, scanning around the area.
I let it cool and then set it to mode five. On this mode it got to medium warm and seems to hold at that level indefinitely while putting out lots of light. The XP-G2 anyway. I’m not a moonlight mode guy. When I use a light, I like a lot of it. The XP-G2 on mode five in this torch is enough to satisfy anyone. Lots of light, and good throw.
The heat is a lot more noticeable with the 18650 tube and a Samsung 30Q. It’s not nearly as bad with 18350.
Received my S41 with XP-G2 and was so pleased with it that I decided that I was not going to mod it (very much).
- I replaced the screws on the emitter-side with longer screws and added nylon washers I cut off from a nylon spacer I got from a gutted laptop.
- Took the board, tailspring and nylon washer out of the tailcap and replaced them with the standard board, tailspring and washer from the BLF SE A6, because I am in doubt about the usefulness of a lighted tailcap with a 18350 battery.
- Bypassed the tailspring with via through the board, since a had to be nearby anyway.
- Topped things off with one of Rey’s titanium clips.
Also introduced a new set of house-rules. 
When in need of a 18650 battery, I’ll use the battery, tube with clip and battery from the BLF SE A6. With an extra washer I made out of a piece of copper wire. All parts are interchangeable, but the threads on the BLF SE A6 are shorter (read: too short to make contact).
Maybe this light doesn’t need all that initial hi drain current. The last quad I built, I used an unprotected NCR18650A 3400 and it was giving me a steady 8A on turbo. Might be a good choice for this torch.
Our BLF-A6 driver, or X6/X6 driver gives you all the current possibilities, you do not need to run it on turbo. (ok, you do, all the time 
)
A reason to not want too much current in the modes that use PWM is that the leds are less efficient at high current. In the BLF-A6 and X%/X6 drivers these are just the currents above 350mA, under that the 7135 is taking over at a really efficient 350mA (PWM-ed to lower modes). Say your hotrod quad is doing 14 amps, the current per led is 3.5A, which is not all that inefficient, for a 219C about 7% less efficient than running it at 8A. For a XP-L Hi the efficiency difference between 14A and 8A is 12, for XP-G3 15.
oh you lucky so and so!lol my nichia was ordered on the 16th but still waiting although when i emailed banggood they said 8-10 days before they get stock back in which should be around the 15th June. maybe itll be an xmas present with all this waiting :person_facepalming:
So, not knowing why the numbers listed for Al and Cu showed a higher value for Al, I looked it up, and found…
“Specific Heat - Specific Heat is the amount of heat required to change a unit mass of a substance by one degree in temperature”
So it takes well over twice the amount of heat to change the temperature of Al as compared to Cu. Which is why the heat is felt so much faster in the copper heat sink, it’s more than twice as efficient.
Thinking about it in those terms, if this were a copper pill inside an aluminum head, the copper would be very efficient getting heat TO the aluminum then a bottleneck would occur, with the Aluminum unable to move heat as fast as it’s coming in. This is not a stagnant issue, as the emitter are cranking out the heat at an alarming rate, so any bottleneck is going to cause the emitters to heat even faster!
We might get away with this in the sense of the lead wires staying connected, no actual meltdown (most of the time) but the emitters are taking a serious beating and their life expectancy HAS to be greatly reduced because of this.
Increasing current with a larger more capable cell only adds to this effect. So if a larger cell is wanted for longer run time, please keep all this in mind and use a lesser capable larger cell so as to only be targeting run time, not increased output. Something like a Panasonic B should do quite well here, in that instance. A BD might be too much, would have to check.
And for the record, the S41 being sent to me shipped today as well. Thank you Neal! 
PS: Like Sharpie is saying, A Sky Ray King in a much smaller package. Good analogy, big light, itty bitty package.
Can’t really look at it by weight, you’re not going to use a same weight piece of aluminum in place of copper. The proportions would be WAY off. So that part of the analysis is not relevant.
Weight is or can be an issue, but on a smaller light the difference is negligible anyway, hardly noticeable. The bigger the piece, the more noticeable the weight difference of course.
Copper isn’t really all that more difficult to machine than aluminum. I am a rookie on a lathe, and I can do it, so for any professional machinist it’s just a gear change, done differently but still done all the same. The shop will milk it, tell you all about how much harder it is, time consuming, blah blah blah… they’re looking for that $90 an hour to add up is all they’re doing. 