Lol no, unless you’re payin!
LOL you made me choke 
Nice cut there. If we were going to guess I think its going to be in 250 000 cd range this cool thrower.
Totally cool, very easy to adjust focal point on smartphone, most AWESOME man!
Nice effort djozz. Thanks.
Next phase, the internals. In my case it really is a phase. Some of you do three of these mods in a day! For me a mod like this is done in an hour here, two hours there, a quarter of an hour to shoot some pictures, etc. (for the glory of this hobby I am looking forward to the day I retire and with my little boy out of the house on his own, this will be an odd 16 years from now).
So I did do some optical tweaking in the end, not for better output (I may even have lost a bit although I don't think so) but to clean up the beam. I made a small blackened collar around the led, made from a sanded down rivet, it should block all the light that will not get to the lens, at least in zoom modus, thus preventing artifacts and rings in the beam. In zoom-out it blocks a small percentage of the light that would reach the lens but not much. I first thought of keeping it shiny and hope for some photon recycling effect, but then I looked at it better, and the shape it is the light is not going back to the die anyway, for that I need a more globular shaped collar and I can not think of something suitable.
I had to spray paint (black matt heatresistant paint) the rivet anyway, so I painted the pill in the same go, not that it will matter for the beam, but it looks so nice :-) !
Here are the painted parts, as you can see the pill surface has some scratch marks, that is from flatness testing. I cleaned that surface first than sanded it, and the way I test the flatness (flat is waaaaay more important than lapped to a shiny finish) is that I push the led-board down onto the pill, twist it around and evaluate the scratch marks, if marks are everywhere, it is as good as flat, if the marks are mostly near the side, it is fairly ok because the copper board is the main heat route to the side anyway (thicker than the pill and has twice the heat conductivity), if the marks are in the middle there is a problem: the middle of the pill is raised and the ledboard is not used in the heat path to the body which is a waste. in this case I had to sand down the middle a bit of the pill surface to get it flat enough.
I used a XP-G2 R5 1A that I had dedomed some time ago for another mod that did not happen (which is fairly common in my case), so not the latest and greatest but it leaves some room for improvement if I am bored sometime in the future 
. I assembled the pill, with the driver I made (soldered a spring to the battery side) and way too thick ledwires (I have only very thick and too thin wire, must get me some nice 22 AWG silicone or teflon wire sometime), and it looks pretty cool I think:
Now the switch situation :tired: . As with the well described 1405, this switch assembly is the worst I have seen ever: a small size switch contained in a plastic housing with the long steel leads (resistance!) sort of floating around with just their own spring tension to make electrical contact. I first tried to attach a layer of solder to improve the electrical conductivity of the switch leads, but the heat of the solder iron almost instantly killed the (plastic) switch mechanics. So I tried to fit in a small Omten switch (same dimensions) and killed that one as well with soldering heat.
At last I decided to leave out the whole switch assembly thingy and use a fat switch that I had around, the 6A ebay switch that I tested for 16A and low resistance before. It had to be rebuild a bit though, the leads were sticking out too far to the side to fit in the hole for the tail switch. So I opened up the switch, removed one of the leads/connectors, chipped a bit off the plastic under it and re-bended the lead so that it was going very flat along the side of the switch, then attached a copper alloy spring (no idea which alloy, it came from Fasttech) to it (the left lead in the picture was re-bended):
I used two cardboard washers (I think it is some impregnated cardboard, they are used in plumbing), one as a spacer between switch and silicon tailcap, one to insulate the switch lead going to the spring (a bit of Kapton tape on the side), and the assembly went in in this order:
Finally I soldered a bit of brass on top of the spring because I needed an extra spacer, and it looks neat :-)
I am not 100% happy about it but it works fine. (I am still angry at the designers: such a nice flashlight but they should have made it for 1x18650 and should have put in a standard big Omten switch on a 17mm switch-board)
Finished! The performance still has to be tested, for now just a white wall beamshot zoomed in, UF-1406 on top, compared to my Uniquefire UF-T20 with dedomed XP-G2 3C at 3A (that does 108kcd). It looks like the mod has worked out reasonably well, in reality the brightness difference is a bit more than in the picture 
. The battery I used for the 1406 in this beamshot is a NCR18650B, so the performance will be a bit better on a high drain battery:
I envy your creativeness. This is a really amazing modded light. Cheers.
Thanks MRsDNF, but there's only so much creativity in this mod, it is mainly a series of little solutions to many little problems that I tried to solve, as do most modders here.
And that there is where your ingeniousness comes into it. Little problems that need solving normally creates the biggest headaches.
I like that brass on the spring, it makes it look a lot more professional when a guy opens up the tailcap. I might have to steal that idea.
I’m the same way too- my wife mainly, if the dining room table isn’t cleaned by morning for breakfast, she doesn’t forget about it. Got a fortune cookie today that says I will have a magical trip to thailand- all I got was, you aint going nowehere! heheh
I keep a stash of money and I bring it out every once in a while for a one way ticket… It’s just one of the many ways I keep my wife taking me for granted. These are tricks of the trade- otherwise you end up on paternity court or jerry
I did some measurements on the modded flashlight today, mainly throw measurements 
, all measurements were done 30 seconds after switch-on on a fully charged battery, unless stated otherwise. I measured the throw at 5 meter and calculated it back to 1 meter, giving klux@1meter (or kcd if you like). I used my Mobilux A luxmeter which should be almost as accurate as you can get for a portable luxmeter.
On a Sony30A battery I got a tail-current (bypassing the switch) of 5.29A after 30 seconds, throw (using the complete light, with switch) was 235 klux@1meter.
On a Panasonic NCR18650PF I got a tail current of 4.61A after 30 seconds, throw was 225 klux@1meter
I measured the throw over time on the Sony30A to see how the output changes, giving an idea of warming-up effects/battery-drain effects:
0sec:253kcd - 10sec:245kcd - 20sec:240kcd - 30sec:235kcd - 1min:226kcd - 2min:219kcd - 5min:208kcd
The output decreases steadily, quite as expected for a direct driven led at high current, I think that I see no dramatic temperature effects, mainly the drainage of the battery. The light was nice 'n hot after five minutes though.
The light output on a NCR18650PF after 30 seconds I measured at 470 lumen zoomed out, 350 lumen zoomed in.
One quick beamshot zoomed-in of the square I live in (to not distress my neighbours too much). I corrected the illuminiation of the picture so that it is an accurate representation of what I see in real. The roof edge in the beam is at 85 meter:
This performance is a little bit under what I had calculated beforehand (I was warned by 18sixfifty already ), I hoped for just a bit more, like 250kcd throw instead of 235. A similar mod on the Jax Z1 (with dedomed XP-G2 S2 at ~5A) was done by Kenjii, he measured about the same throw as this mod.
I like it the way it is now, a compact thrower with some wow to it. This mod is all about throw, but I must mention that the tint is a nice neutral, and the zoomed-out beam is beautiful, a very even illumination (less artifacts and also wider than the UF-T20) with a sharp edge.
I consider the mod finished and succesfull .
and now wait for my UF-1405 to arrive. I think of a similar mod with shortened battery tube (for 1x26650 battery), but with a XM-L2 dedomed.
Nice, you turned lemons into lemonade. Lemonade with almost a kilometer of throw. 
I’m hoping to do this to a Jax Z1… and it looks like it’ll probably be far less work.
Great write up on the mod and results.
Once you get the 1405 you need to take a family picture. .. (of the flashlights)
nice mod you did there i really scared when you cut it down but the results are fantastic
but i have a question about your upcoming UF1405 why you said you will use XM-L2 why not XP-G2 for maximum throw iam asking this because i bought the UF1405 in the Gearbest GB and i was aiming for XP-G2
For doubling again of the throw (400+ klux at 1 meter) you should go for the dedomed XP-G2, it will be an amazing thrower like that.
But I have never made a dedomed XM-L2 thrower as yet, so despite reports from others I am curious about its performance myself.
And also there is a feeling that I have that apart from the throw distance, a big flashlight should have a large output, and 450 OTF lumen zoomed out (which is what a dedomed XP-G2 does in a zoomie) IMO does not fit the large size of the 1405, it should put out double that.
It seems there is a point where the beam is less of a torch beam and more of a laser. With the DEFT-X and other extremely high-lux XP-G2 aspherics, the pinpoint beam might be a bit too small to be useful, and too intense to be safe.
I don’t know at what point the beam goes from “thrower” to “laser”, but as a general guess or guideline, I suspect the tipping point may be somewhere around when the kcd number is higher than the lumens.
Odd that as a carpenter I never have thought of using dowels.
Hi djozz, is the pill in your 1406 look exactly the same as the one in 1405?
This is how the pill in the 1405 (bigger head) looks. Picture taken from mholdenattorney.
Do you think we can remove the brass ring around the driver to have slightly bigger diameter to accommodate bigger driver? For example the LD-29 and some grinding works done to reduce the driver/contact board diameter.
The pill of the 1405 is wider than the 1406 one but the narrower part that holds the driver looks the same to me and is for a17mm driver. To fit a larger driver you could grind down the complete narrow part and replace it by a dedicated made wider ring (there is enough space in the battery tube for that), screwed onto the pill (holes in the ring and pill, threads tapped in the holes in the pill). If you (like me) do not have the opportunity to machine parts, perhaps there is a brass end-cap of correct size in the plumbing supplies store that you can use. Without a drawing this does not make much sense probably, but I'm on my phone right now so that will not be possible.
djozz, i wonder if you can help me, I put together a similar light using a dedomed xpg2 and fet driver from Richard in a jax Z1 host. problem is i cant get this thing to pull more than 3.5 A from a single cell of any kind (i have tried them all). Finally I hooked the emitter up directly to a 4200 efest IMR 26650 yesterday and it was at 4A but quickly dropped to 3.5 again. I’m measuring tail current properly with massive leads to a fluke multimeter. Im wondering, does your driver boost voltage somehow to get more current to flow (sorry i dont even know if this is possible my electronics is pretty poor) or is this xpg2 that i got just an anomaly ?
thanks Brian