Acquired this neat little, one off, Skyray Light. Its a 3x XML, 3x 18650 side switch. Kinda unique really, at least in my collection.
Anyway, it has a crap driver. With 3x AW IMR’s I was only seeing 2.6a on high at the tail. I copper braided the springs in the carrier, and now I’m around 3.1a. A decent improvement, but not enough.
Is there anything I could do to this driver. (Besides the obvious, I know I need to do new wires, I just dont have any on me atm.) What about those resistors? It looks like it already has some stacked?
Parallel cells & parallel LEDs? You should be safe to fiddle with the resistors with little risk of letting the smoke out.
Short across the resistor pile with tweezers, see if/how much the output increases. Not knowing what the two hidden resistors are, it could have some untapped potential or it might already be nearly maxed out. Don't know until you try!
Listfire 3xU2 has almost the same driver.
Tried to mod it, it has 2 r060 resistors on parallel.
Using a trim pot, I find difficult to gain some amps.
I will try adding some low resistors in parallel.
Well, I couldn’t wait. I figured I’d try to play around with it, and see what happened. I followed your instructions Comfy. Used a piece of a paperclip to bridge the resistor stack, and seen ZERO change on the dmm. Seemed kinda weird. So in the name of science, I just soldered a copper wire bridge across that stack, and put it back together. WOW. I can feel the heat from the front of the torch now, it is insanely bright. So I try to get a reading AGAIN at the tail. It’s bouncing between 3.5-3.8, and barely any heat out the front, hmm. I think my dmm might be severely limiting the current, and not giving me the right readings. Not sure what to do at this point. It’s definably brighter, but I don’t really like flying blind. I may just go out and buy a new meter.
…also, some 18ga wire, and xml2 u2’s on copper. J)
edit: Ok, this thing definitely got a lot brighter. It gets warm almost instantly now, and it’s trading blows with my Vinh modded Solarforce K3 MTG2 head. Would really like to know what this thing is pulling…