Faulty PL47 Partial Teardown

Rusty · 2019-07-28T15:37:24.000Z

I originally posted this on the back of a long PL47 thread before I realised it was in the commercial sellers spot and my be frowned upon posting there, so I moved it……………

Does anybody know where to get replacement parts from, particularly new glass lens and maybe aux board?

I purchased and received a faulty unit recently (I was aware), which had 1 faulty LED plus intermittent aux LED’sand I proceeded to gain access through the front; the press fit retaining ring was relatively easy to remove, but despite my best efforts I managed to crack the lens :person_facepalming:

It may be interesting to note what I found inside:

Initial view I saw the intermittently faulty AUX board looked like it had been run over; you can see in the image below it is cracked in several places and one of the cyan LED’s has completely lost its dome/gel (whatever it’s called), the one near the ‘fireflies’ printing. The faulty LED is top right in this image and closer inspection with a high powered magnifier noted evidence of the right hand bond wire overheating and bubbling the gel, presumably disconnecting and causing the failure - I have some SST-20’s on the way from BSM so should be golden :sunglasses:

Upon removing the aux board and connecting to PSU, nothing would work except the LVP red LED’s, though if I flexed the board slightly in a certain way, the blue LED’s would light. I suspected a dry joint or a broken track, but couldn’t find either.

Here you can see the board is all over the shop wonky

After much scouring (things are really tiny on this board), I found the broken track, apologies for the poor photograph through cheapo 60x magnifier:

I managed to scrape a little solder mask and bridge the broken track with solder - not sure how robust it will be, but jeez it’s hard working on such small area, through a magnifying loupe.

Next was the MCPCB to take out; turned out to be a reasonably substantial item. Unfortunately going to the bother of lump of copper MCPCB is a little pointless if you’re going to leave huge burrs that prevent it sitting flat, even if it were able to sit flat you could strike matches on the rough mating face and even then a total absence of any heatsink paste, at all:

Not pictured is the front of the MCPCB, bubbled in places presumably due to heat. I hope this is just solder mask and nothing terminal.

Sorry for the diatribe, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way if internal shots of this torch and thought the pics may be of interest.

Hopefully I can get this running again; may need a new aux board and just got to try and source a new lens.

TexasToasted · 2019-07-30T01:28:56.000Z

“the press fit retaining ring was relatively easy to remove”

You can’t just post something like that without details!
I figured I would have to bust out the glass to be able to pry out the ring. How did you remove the ring?

Rusty · 2019-07-30T17:58:34.000Z

TexasToasted:

“the press fit retaining ring was relatively easy to remove”

You can’t just post something like that without details!
I figured I would have to bust out the glass to be able to pry out the ring. How did you remove the ring?

Lol, sorry, guilty as charged.

I’ll post images if clarity is needed, but the gist of it was that I used a metal spudger that was thin enough to work under the retaining ring and make a start on getting it out. Unfortunately the spudger was not strong enough to give the required leverage and completely extract the retaining ring; this is what may need pictures, but next I used a small pry bar to work around and the ring; I used the spudger to try and spread the load (unsuccessfully as I cracked the glass) and eventually worked the retaining ring out.

e1000 · 2019-07-30T18:13:13.000Z

Are you going to replace the MCPCB? Those look like XM-L2’s which are 5050 and SST-20’s are 3535. While the voltage is right, the pad size is different

Tally-ho · 2019-07-30T18:19:58.000Z

@e1000,
The LEDs on the MCPCB are SST-20, I guess they will be swapped with ones from BlueSwordM which have better tint.

Rusty · 2019-07-30T18:22:59.000Z

e1000:

Are you going to replace the MCPCB? Those look like XM-L2’s which are 5050 and SST-20’s are 3535. While the voltage is right, the pad size is different

No, I’ll re-use the MCPCB, spending some time to smooth its rough bottom :smiling_imp: and deburr the holes, the LED’s it came with are definitely SST-20’s; I think the PL47 only came with option for 3535 LED’s no matter which version you chose (SST-20/XPL-HI/219C).

e1000 · 2019-07-30T18:25:18.000Z

My bad, carry on!

1stein · 2019-09-04T12:29:59.000Z

Rusty, any new info on this? Did you order parts?