“What I want to avoid is: ”I ordered my light yesterday and it still hasn’t shipped”, “It has been 4 weeks and I still do not have it”, etc. etc. If they run out of a certain tint they will make more, period. There will be a delay but that can be expected. PayPal gives us 6 months protection so I do not want to see people jumping the gun because they may be out of stock for a week.“
Maybe that quote should be a sticky on every page of this thread.
Just because they say they shipped, does not mean they have left the building. They probably just moved closer to the shipping/receiving door
Come on’ David, you been here long enough to know the rules, Order it and forget about it for 3 weeks.
Dollars to Donuts says we all get our lights in the USA within 3 days of each other, regardless of whether you ordered them 10 minutes after the code was released or 5 days later.
Always happens that way.
I’m one of many who ordered a 3D and are yet to see it shipped. My order was placed on the 14th Aug. I’m not worried as it’s just s stock and processing delay.
The 3D stock that you are all referring to arrived there on Friday AFTER the listing. Just because it arrived does not mean that they have an army ready to ship 1000+ lights on the weekend. During the same week and BEFORE the 3D arrived the 1A and 5A were already there. When the code went out it was the weekend and there were 1000 lights with 500 coming.
So.....RELAX :) It is going to take some time in transit unless one wants to pay for DHL service.
On this one, I had already done a standard spring bypass before I added the wire through the pcb. Now I just drill the hole and run one single wire from the switch to the top of the spring.
I like to find the place where the spring starts, there’s always a gap there between the pad and the first coil. I exploit this to enable getting the wire through. Starting on top of the board, beside the switch, I drill a small hole through at an angle, aiming to come out inside the spring. Then I use a drill bit big enough to allow the wire to just fit, and enlarge the hole. Starting with the switch, I solder the wire on the inside of the tab, between the tab and the body. Gotta do this quick or too much heat will go into the switch and mess it up, I like to clamp small curved jaw hemostats on the flat part of the tab right at the switch body to act as a heat sink and try to avoid this damage. Then I run the wire through and cut it off a little long, this enables a slight coil to be twisted onto the wire before soldering it to the top of the spring. This coil lets the wire stack just like the spring so it doesn’t end up breaking. I’ve also found that laying the stripped end over the end of the spring and wrapping it around the spring wire gives a good solid solder joint that won’t break lose or come undone.
And there ya have it! More to writing it up than the actual doing of it.
Edit: if the start of the spring isn’t in place to be beside the switch, I remove the spring and drill the hole, then place the spring back on it’s pad so the gap portion straddles the wire.
The main problem that I’ve always run into is not within the switch itself but the spring getting hot and sagging, breaking connection to the cell. The wire takes the current and keeps the spring from getting too hot. I’ve got an Eagle Eye X6 running a Luminus SBT-70 at 17A through a bypassed switch like this. I’m using the big copper pill I drew up for a quad, and the X6 still gets too hot to hold in 26 seconds. I know this because I’ve used this light to run down 18650’s and could only hold it 26 seconds at a time. That’s right at the point the turbo step down kicks in, but I still had to shut it down and set it on a heat sink to cool off. The SBT-70 is a horribly inefficient driver, burning off tons of current in heat while making relatively low lumens. In this case, only 1500 lumens for 17A of draw.
So yeah, the bypass helps switch life in that it delivers a steady current and saves the spring.
“Would it be okay to just do the spring and not directly to the switch?”
Yes
As long as you’re not running over 6A or so, or using it for prolonged periods that may tend to heat up the spring/pcb.
Edit: You really don’t need to worry about it with the A6. The new emitters don’t allow much over 5A so it’s not a big deal. If you want to squeeze every last drop out of the emitter, do the spring bypass. If you’re going to be using it hard, go through the pcb directly to the switch.
