First Time Modder Help

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
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Is the LED on a copper board? if not, you may have little to no gain with the copper pill.

How comfortable are you with soldering? You’ll need to solder the driver’s wires to the LED board.

1. Insert the driver into the bottom of the pill, screw it in with the retaining ring if the pill came with a retaining ring.

2. Put thermal paste under the LED board and put in on top of the copper pill.

3. Verify the LED and driver’s polarity and solder the wire leads onto the LED board.

4. Apply some thermal paste on the pill’s threads and screw it in the C8 body.

5. Watch out for shorts and insert the battery + first, and enjoy your light!

Please be careful with the li-ion battery including short circuits, overdischarging and overcharging.

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Thank you for this helpful information. I have Panasonic Orbtronic dual protected batteries to hopefully prevent it shorting out.

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Great, those are decent cells.

Good luck with your build and let us know how it turns out!

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One question, how do you determine the polarities? Are they marked or color coded?

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They should be marked (+ or -).

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this modding guide by gords might help, lots of pictures as well:

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Yes the pics are very helpful. As far as the thermal paste, will this work?

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That’s a thermal adhesive, meaning that it will semi-permanently glue the LED board to the copper pill. If you want to do additional mods to the light in the feature, you might want to look for a thermal paste, instead of a thermal adhesive.

Also, I don’t think the quality of that is as good as the more well known ones, such as Arctic Cooling MX-4 or Arctic Silver 5.

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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835100007
http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Compound-Grams/dp/B000OGX5AM

This seems to be the most recommended thermal compound. I used it on a few cpu heatsinks and the tube was just sitting there so I’ve been using it under flashlight stars as well.

If you plan on doing a lot more builds it would likely be better to buy the 12g tube instead of the 3.5g tube.

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I finally got all my parts to mod my light. One question, how does the driver secure into the pill? Someone said screw it in but im not sure how you would do that.

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A common method is to press the driver into the pill and bridge the ground ring of the driver to the pill in 1 or more places. This can be difficult and require more heat than for the usual solder connections. Make sure to clean both surfaces and use flux.

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And if the pill is aluminium, it is very hard to solder to. What I do is solder a thin copper wire around the edge of the driver, and then file it to shape with a small file so that it is just sticking out from the side, then I can press- fit it in the pill. This also gives a good electrical connection from the driver to battery- neg.

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Ok thank you. Mine is brass.

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Is this what I would want to do then?

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Hi Hemimike. Yes, you just want to solder that driver's outter ring in one or two spots to the pill. Doesn't need to be much. Focus on applying the solder to the pill as the pill will suck up the heat, but the driver will not. You don't want to heat the driver to the point that components start to unsolder and shift. If I were you, I would apply a couple solder blobs to the pill without the driver in place. Then put in the driver and just bridge the solder blobs to the driver.

You don't have many 7135 chips on that board. Most people like to drive their C8 fairly hard.

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Ok thank you. Idk, I was told to remove 6 chips in another post.

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Gj wrote:

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Oh, ok. I missed that post. Sorry, I was assuming you were using one of the current high power white emitters.

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:slight_smile:

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It works. Just finished it a little bit ago. I will post pics soon. One question, does that articsilver 5 ever dry?