Just found my old 3xAAA LED Lenser Hokus Focus, bought 2007 IIRC. Haven’t used it since 2009 and thought that it might be a good host for a zoomable flashlight, so I disassembled the head (glued with some kind of flexible glue/silicone). What type of LED is this? The brown spot on the phosphor doesn’t look normal, but I don’t remember if it started to fail back then.
looks like cooked Phosphor, but usually the LEDs turn blue when too hot
and the phosphors color looked unchanged of a dead cooked LED I had, it was just a bit flaky and had some bubbles in it
you may try to get a 10mm star(probably filed down a bit) in there with a modern XPG2 or so
A replacement LED might not be so easy to find. It must use the original mount in order to work with the zoomable TIR optics (basically an outer and an inner section with different focal points). The LED is moved inside a hole in the optics when you zoom out, so it cannot be any wider as the original construction. I could put a star on directly on the aluminum pill (after machining off the raised section), but then the focus won’t work anymore.
In the end it is probably not worth the effort. The design is not that efficient, it will be hard to find a cell that fits in the battery tube without too much wasted space, the tail switch is longer than the head. All in all this is (and was) really not a good flashlight.
some of the 3w china luxeon clones are decent and should drop in.
thats a cooked luxeon III