Did some mods to mine yesterday.
Recap mine was pulling 2.11amps on high with a KingKong 26650 INR.
I was disappointed with the throw and colour despite the good amp draw.
First thing I did was the pencil mod which I hasten to say worked brilliantly. I then moved the red wire to the output1+ with no other changes.
It was now pulling 2.86amps on start up and just over 3.0amps after about 20 secs.
The beam was still horrible though.
I then removed the reflector and the driver and NOTE the led just falls out. There is nothing, no thermal compound or anything holding it in place. The only thing I could see was something that looked like a few drops of something oily.
Next step was to fit an XP-G2 NW on a noctigon. Anyone else doing this I highly recommend using a 20mm star. I only had a 16mm. In order to get the reflector to clear the solder points I have to file the square edge off of the outside of the reflector base. Sadly it still just fouls the solder points, but does allow the white centering ring to seat on the star now. Ideally I’d have liked not to use the white plastic centering ring.
I beefed up the wire (20 or 22 gauge I think) and resolder the driver.
It now pulls 2.46amps on high (showing that an XP-G2 does indeed pull less amps than an XM-L on the same driver, not sure why, but have seen this on 3 other XP-G2 installs).
The colour is obviously way better and the beam is improved. Sadly I didn’t get the XP-G2 perfectly centered, another reason to use a 20mm star if you have one. But throw is massively improved, it now easily out throws my Imalent DDR2 XM-L2, which it was nowhere even close too before.
And oddly the white centering ring seems to work quite well with the XP-G2 giving an almost XM-L sized hotspot.
Overall I think the light is much improved for these changes, which really has only been a LED & star plus moving some wires about.
Thanks OL for the group buy.