So I think I may have (probably) burnt out my emitter last night. I managed to dedome and XM-L2. As I was sitting typing a message in another thread I left the light tail standing on high… P60 host with some heat sinking mods.
As I finished up my message (probably around 5+ minutes) it shut off/burnt out. The light was quite warm but I don’t think it was anywhere as close being as hot (~50 *C) as some other members have described…
Are there any visual indicators that are tell-tale signs of a toasted emitter (burn marks, etc…) or could there have been a potential failure in the driver?
It was quite late when I finished/posted last night so I probably wasn’t thinking straight… I should not have been up or posting…
Thanks for any clarification/suggestions for this!
Unsolder at least one of the wires from the driver (to eliminate any possibility of a short somewhere else in the ckt), try to light it up using something safe like a 3v CR123. Check with polarity in both directions (hey, you never know). If there's no light it's possible there was a poor solder connection between the LED & MCPCB that worked for a while, but let go after it heated up the first time. Remove the board and re-reflow it again, then recheck with the CR123. Still no light, toss it.
Thanks Comfy… I’ll re-re it once I get a chance… I figured I would smell burning or something. Hopefully it is as your described. I tried using a larger gauge wire on the driver but wasn’t entirely confident of the soldering on to the emitter… will start there.
I had a similar problem. In my case, I put 2x18650 (>7v) on a drop-in that was spec’ed for 1x18650 :).
Anyway, that was what got me started into modding, awhile ago, and I had a thread about my “adventures”:
In my case, it turned out that the emitter was killed, but there was no visible evidence, so I had to do the type of testing/diagnosis mentioned above, and in that thread.
Just to add some more fuel to the de-doming debate fire, this is exactly the behavior I saw when attempting de-doming with any method other than gasoline... LED dead in all those cases. None of the gasoline-dunked ones have died yet.
Thanks for this Jim… I had read it before when researching and now it is more applicable to me… lol!
When it gets to the little components on the circuit board its kind of above my understanding right now… I’ll try some of the tests you did on the emitter and go from there…
so I took the pill apart and the culprit was one of the contacts on the emitter… it seems leaving it on high for so long made the trace on the +ve delaminate …. i scrapped away some of the paint exposing more of the trace further up from the original pad and soldered my wire there… there are some fitment issues with the reflector now because it isn’t quite sitting flush with the emitter like it was before so the beam is somewhat ringy… I don’t really like that.
the beam is also much warmer than it was before… a bit warm for my tastes… If I can figure out how to smooth the beam out (want to keep a smooth reflector) that perhaps I’ll leave it be… otherwise I’ll use the emitter to drive something else……
Thanks for all of the help and info… it has definitely been a learning experience!
