I received and assembled my first light on saturday… s6 with nichia 219 and 17mm FET driver from mtn electronics… worked great sat Sunday and monday… monday night began having some flickering so i changed out my battery… now it will not turn on at all… i checked the connections to the led seem ok not loose… any suggestions for troubleshooting. I was thinking possiblt the batteries i have (crappy ultrafire). ordered some new Panasonic 3400mah yesterday
Any thouhts, thanks
Jeremy
Make sure the non-anodized end of the battery tube is screwed into the head of the light. Also, make sure the reflector isn’t shorting out on one of the solder pads on the led mcpcb.
In addition to what djburkes said, try tightening the retaining ring both in the tailcap and driver side. Sometimes it becomes unscrewed:
The forward voltage of the Nichia is low enough you might have blown the led with the FET driver. Look at the graph on this thread. For your sake I hope not but if that is in fact the case you need an emitter with higher Vf for direct drive.
Unfortunately Swib, i think thats exactly what happened. I was running it on high for a couple minutes seeing how hot it would get.Lesson learned, well maybe anyway. I am very new to the hobby. It was my first build “dierct drive” just sounded so good, guess not in this case. Ill pick up a qlite and a new led and try again.
Thanks for the trouble shooting advice guys, i didnt even think about the reflector shorting out on the led contacts. I really thought that was gonna be the problem, Or the batt tube being backwards.
Before you throw in the towel check with a dmm to see if the switch has melted. Just use the lowest ohm setting and put the leads between the spring and the retaining ring. If after clicking the switch you still don’t see close to zero ohms, the switch is toast. You were pushing a lot of amps through the tail with the low Vf emitter. With a FET setup you need to either bypass the spring or use a copper beryllium spring from Mountain.
I do suggest that you get a different emitter for a FET driver. Maybe an XP-L HI or XM-L2 with the color temperature that suits your taste.
Welcome to the wonderful world of blowing stuff up. :money_mouth_face:
It likely won’t be your last but the rewards are worth the pain. Shake it off and stay positive.
Not sure that’s the case. I put together a S2 and S2+ with Nichia 219c’s with FET+1 drivers and bypassed drive and switch springs. Haven’t had any problems running either with 30Q’s. With a cheap Harbor Freight DMM and thick leads both pull over 7A’s at the tail.