Well, was on my bedside table and while putting it on it, I missed the table. Fell head first on the floor and stopped working. I unscrewed it and this is what I saw….The LED has detatched so has the plastic…
Anyways how to fix it? This has been my EDU flashlight but I am less than impressed it did not survive such a low fall when Simon shows much much more on falls….
This was bought from Gearbest. I doubt it will be worthwhile to engage with CS for a replacement/fix
check whether the LED is still working (I use a multimeter or a test station)
clean the emitter base plate if necessary, I would then use a no clean flux pen (or similar), put solder paste on the pads and then position the LED. you can either put this on a hot plate (like a mini oven) or reflow with hot air (gun or reflow station). Old-Lumens also had a cool video somewhere with it, found it:
It happened to me, I have analyzed the fact and I arrived at these conclusions: (in my case)
The LED is not original Cree; for soldering is not used a good solder; LED is slightly off center and this causes a lateral thrust from the reflector, when there is a collision, even banal, the lateral thrust separates the LED from the base. Briefly: the LED was assembled cheaply and approximate.
I remedied solder it again, with good solder, and placing well in the center. The LED have not changed, but is closely supervised!
Cree isn’t the one that mounts them to the mcpcb. I don’t see a reason to believe they aren’t genuine Cree emitters. It looks like whoever Simon buys his emitters from is either not using enough solder paste or not heating them high/long enough in the reflow oven.
But this was from gearbest. They could be buying hosts and adding their own leds. Who knows with them. Led might not have been relowed by Simon’s suppliers.
If that counts, the light has been used on max power (10 mins or so at times) and medium modes (25-30mins average) at times.
If I just add solder and solder back the led to it, will it work again?
The led die (square) came off the plastic too. The plastic is not properly marked + or -. I will have a closer look tonight if there are markings on it.
Thanks for this thread link.
Chinese manufacturers should stop using high temp solder already, my BLF A6 had the same problem in both the driver and the mcpcb, the soldering they use are the cheapest type with high melting point and fast-burn rosin, doesn’t work long enough before the solder spreads. Also tried to desolder leads from a nitecore mcpcb and even my 40W station couldn’t do the job.
I’ve been using low-melt solder for my reflows and haven’t had any problem even with my hot rod mods. Low-melt are more expensive, but it also saves a lot of time and headache.