Could I just ground the contact of the switch ring tube/spring to the bare Al of the pill? I have done that before, but with a brass pill in a D3C. this pill does not have much room, and I find soldering to Al more difficult than brass or copper.
Would it be wiser to cut some recesses down in the pill so get more surface area, similar to how the Reylight Gemini driver is set up?
I would use a Convoy driver size adapter or something similar, but I do not have any vertical room to play with unless I shave down the height of the pill. The driver/pill will be held in place by a threaded retaining ring.
I will be slightly shaving down the driver diameter to fit better. Probably, If I find a definite solution, I will be potting this light.
I may be forgetting some info as I’m currently at work, but I need to I will update with a reply post.
Can you upload some pictures of how the pill and retaining ring sit in the host?
I don’t see any threads on the pill so does the entire pill get held in with a retaining ring?
I will post some more pictures in an hour or so when home.
It is an e-switch, and the spring that came in the light fits the driver nearly perfectly (although it’s thicker “walled” than the FW tube, so it takes a 16340 instead of 18350.
The whole pill just slides into the driver cavity, then there’s a retaining ring that goes over it.
the threads are the same all along the length both for the battery tube and retaining ring, unlike the FW lights. The tube is reversible and the tailcap threads are the same. I have thought about swapping an FW switch into the light, but it’s board is a bit smaller diameter.
If you remove the red solder mask from around the outside edge you can expose the ground ring.
Then maybe the retaining ring can make the ground contact.
As long as the retaining ring and spring don’t contact both(bridge/short) the ground and the switch ring it would work.
I see what you mean by looking at the Lume1 driver. The original Novatac driver is the bottom right in this picture.
I would prefer to use the FET 7+1 driver, but it doesn’t appear to have contact there on the underside of the driver, only the top.
On the red driver, it’s already party scratched away just from tightening down the retaining ring, so I will do what you say and it seems like it should work. I did not think of that, so thanks!
another sort of issue is coming up with a decent enough spacer or stack of spacers in the head. I have seen a few triple Novatac mods here on BLF, but it looks like they’ve all been lathe turned down inside, and have had custom machined parts like the pill.
I dry fit it, and it seems like the spring cannot touch the ground ring/retaining ring when the body tube is in place. The spring is about 0.3mm thicker walled than an FW contact tube, but still fits the driver contact well.
If you’re in the contiguous 48, I could send you some brass strips which you could fashion to use as spring replacements. Looks like good analytical work so far, I can’t wait to see what you do with this.
Kind of…the pill unit, at least for my stock spl120, is held together by some kind of glue/potting. It’s a semi-hollow cylindrical slug, with the driver on the bottom and the LED “star” affixed to the top. The entirety of the pill is essentially free floating, held in the head with the brass retaining ring.
Inside the head, there is a kind of platform that forms a separation between the pill and the reflector well.
the internal cross section looks something as follows. Please forgive the crude 20 second drawing.
the later SPA models built in China dispensed with calibration of the extra modes, so they are not evenly spaced. HDS found this unacceptable, and that led to Henry dissolving his initial partnership w the Novatac company.
and btw, though HDS continues to claim the max output is 120 lumens, I have never found that to be true.. pretty much all the ones Ive tested range from about 70 to 90 lumens
Hogo claims he personally callibrated them to 120 lumens, but that he used a “special” conversion factor to account for the cool white CCT of the LEDs
in any case.. the early drivers, Tucson, produce considerably higher output when swapped to a modern LED such as 519a, some go up to about 400 lumens
the Chinese models also gain output w a new LED, but not as much, some only get to 120 to 200 lumens..
