Welcome to BLF ” mrnorrisman ” , you are at the correct place for an answer. 
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I had the same problem, and it lasted for months. I even canceled the order twice and complained, emailed, chatted. etc…
I finally realized they are not restocking it, or it sells out very fast. I found a nice guy here on BLF that had one for sale and I purchased it from him. It had one of the few original TA drivers and has somewhere between 22K and 25K lumens, hard to check accurately. Sorry for the bad news 
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Haikelite was having problems with its drivers, for using cheap parts. You probably would only get 17K lumens from their driver. You would need to buy one from Lexel here on BLF, then you could get 25K lumens after bypassing the springs.
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Just FYI , the MT09R is a flooder and on turbo it gets hot very fast and sucks your batteries down fast as well. It will burn colored paper and its no toy. Maybe look for a used one here http://budgetlightforum.com/forum/marketplace/sell or here
http://budgetlightforum.com/forum/marketplace/buy
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Good luck 
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Awesome, thanks for the reply CNCman.
I was afraid of that. I may give it a couple more weeks and if there is no sign of it shipping then I will try to get a refund on the order.
As far as I know, the one I was getting from Banggood was with the updated driver (V2 as some are calling it) but that still may be different from the TA driver you are talking about.
If I don’t hear anything soon I will contact Lexel. Hopefully they still have some left and they haven’t all been bought up yet.
I knew I may be sacrificing some lumen output by buying the stock version from Banggood, but I figured it would be easier than trying to hunt one down in the forums. Looks like I may have been wrong.
Thanks for welcoming me; I came from r/flashlight and BLF is yet another place to get ideas on how to make my wallet mad at me.
This is a pic of TA’s driver.
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And Lexels driver.
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I got the Haikelite MT09R (XHP70.2 5000k neutral-white) from Haikelite’s AliExpress store last year. The model appears to still be listed there.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32977222486.html
MT09R (XHP35-Hi) is the more throwy version (I have not tried this version)
MT09R (XHP70.2) is flood with a throwy (small) center hotspot
MT03 (XHP70.2) is a very wide floody beam of light.
That might be where I go if I can’t get the Banggood order to work and no one here on the forum has it available.
Ideally I want to spend less than $180 though since I had a promo code on Banggood that brought the total down to $104 which is more in my budget.
If anyone knows of a good promo code for AliExpress that may work let me know.
Leftmost (silver/white) is MT09R, its reflector is much deeper than the MT03 TA.
Haikelite MT09R (3x XHP70.2 5000k) beamshot:
Haikelite MT03 TA Devourer (3x XHP70.2 5000k) beamshot
For comparison, the Haikelite MT40 is a more throwy light (unfortunately, I don't have the MT09R 3x XHP35-Hi version which supposedly can throw farther)
Those are some great comparisons, thanks. I definitely like the flood that the MT09R has. The MT03 is also nice.
I really wanted more even more flood (similar to the Acebeam X45 but that’s way out of my price range)
Update: I finally got my MT09R from Banggood just a few days ago. Shipping took almost two and a half months but it was worth the wait, this light is a beast.
Now onto modding it…
Hey I also recently purchased and received a MT09R as well. How do you plan on modding yours? I’ve read that the FET that it comes with might have some problems with spring bypasses.
@UpperX
I’ve got a few things in mind. The first of which is to try and flash Anduril firmware onto it (you can read this post for more info), since I have it on some other lights and miss it.
I was planning on doing spring bypasses on all the springs but mine arrived with double springs so I don’t know if a bypass would really be worth the trouble. Maybe some other members can chime in here.
If I do bypass the springs, I’ll also upgrade the FET with this Infenion version since it’s much higher quality than the one that comes with the light as far as I’m aware. Somewhere in a post people were saying Haikelite was using cheap/fake FETs so instead of risking burning one out with a spring bypass, it’d be better to just upgrade it.
Besides that though I don’t think there’s much else I will change. The emitters are good enough to suit my needs so I don’t see myself re-flowing new emitters in this light, at least not anytime soon. Plus I wouldn’t know where to source them. If you have any interesting ideas, let me know.
@mrnorrisman
Thanks for the plethora of insight. I got into flashlights not too long ago so a lot of these modding concepts are still pretty foreign to me. I was originally just planning on doing some spring bypasses and upgrading the FET or hiring another community member to do it for me. Can you explain double springs to me? I want to check for myself if mine came with them as well. Does having double springs essentially make bypassing redundant? Also I was wondering how does one actually open up the flashlight and access the internal driver? Thanks
@UpperX
You’re welcome! I also got into this very recently so I’m learning a lot too.
Double springs are basically springs inside of springs. From what I understand, the double springs essentially help to lower the resistance from the batteries to the driver. Double springs are also easier for manufacturers to mass produce so they use them in place of a spring bypass. But yes, essentially the double springs make the bypass redundant. That being said, I would assume a spring bypass with a wire would still outperform a double spring since it can carry the current more efficiently but I don’t know this for sure.
Here are some pictures of the double springs on my MT09R for reference.
Battery springs:
Driver spring (between the battery carrier and the driver board):
The flashlight basically has two parts, the battery carrier and the head. First you would need to remove the head from the carrier simply by unscrewing it.
From here you can see the driver board behind a retaining ring (not sure if that’s the correct term, but that’s what I call it). This ring has two tiny little dimples that allow you to use a spanner wrench, such as this one, to unscrew the ring. I don’t have one of these tools yet so I went the cheap and dirty route and made one using a 2x4 and two nails spaced the correct width. Once this ring is removed the driver board can be lifted out.
This picture shows the ring with the dimples removed from the head, with the driver board in the background.
@mrnorrisman
Wow thank you so much you’re the best. I’m glad I asked you how to open up the internals because there’s no way I would’ve guessed otherwise.
As it turns out I also have double springs so I guess a bypass is out the window for now. Does double spring also equate to having similar max lumen output to the bypassed MT09Rs or does it not work like that?
@UpperX
Glad I could help!
I would imagine the max output would be similar, but maybe not quite up to the level of a wire bypass.
Thanks for the pictures!
I’ve updated a BLF Q8 and Sofirn Q8 to Anduril before. But I haven’t dared to try updating the MT09R yet.
I wasn’t aware it’s quite easy to access the driver side by unscrewing the retaining ring… (I’m not a “modder” and don’t have much soldering skills…)
But I have some questions:
- in Toykeeper’s Anduril compiled builds repository, I don’t see a pre-built Anduril firmware for the MT09R, any idea which might be the closest that can be used?
- any idea where to find the original MT09R NarsilM v1.3 firmware file? In case I want to revert back from Anduril to the original NarsilM firmware (or is there a way to “dump” the existing MT09R NarsilM firmware to a hex file for future use?
You’re welcome! Pictures make everything nicer.
I have another thread setup about trying to flash Anduril onto the MT09R, but it hasn’t gotten much traction yet.
There isn’t a build for the MT09R yet, which is what makes it tricky. In my other post on the other thread I mentioned the MF01S from Astrolux uses a very similar driver setup so the firmware for it may be compatible with a few minor tweaks.
I haven’t been able to find a NarsilM firmware file anywhere either, but I agree that would be very nice to have. A quick google search suggests it may be possible to pull the firmware off the existing MT09R to a hex file, but I’ve never done it and haven’t put much research into it. Lexel or TA may have the firmware somewhere since I know they have both designed drivers for this light, and have working versions of NarsilM running on it.
Regarding dump the stock firmware to a hex file, I seem to recall asking that question and someone (probably TK herself) replied how to do it… except I can’t find that message thread.
But anyway, a Google search from another forum, states to use this command-line option:
“avrdude -U flash:r:firmware-dump.hex:i”
Maybe someone who’s more familiar with avrdude can confirm if the above is the correct command for dumping the original firmware to a hex file for future re-flashing use.
That seems like a promising command. I don’t have my programmer and SOIC8 clip yet (it’s still shipping) otherwise I would give that a test.
My only concern would be whether or not the hex file that generates could then be put right back onto the chip without any issues.
I forget how (even though I came across it within the past week), but there is definitely a way to create valid backups. (It may be the command quoted above.)
Ah, found it again. From this thread, the backup command is avrdude.exe -p attiny85 -c usbasp -U eeprom:r:backup.hex:a, where “backup.hex” can be swapped out for whatever filename you want (retain the .hex file type). Though I believe that can be shortened to avrdude -p t85 -c usbasp -U eeprom:r:backup.hex. That said, I have not (yet) tried the quoted command nor either version of the command in my post.
Oh thanks! That’s going to be super useful! I definitely need to read up on avrdude.