Having curbed my flashlight purchases for a little, I couldn’t resist the recent Aurabuy A60 deal.
It turned up last week, smack-bang in the middle of ‘Mod Month’. So here we go….
Apart from the plastic reflector, it’s a solid light, with good hot-rodding potential.
Here’s the ‘exploded view’;
The way the pill is designed as part of the body is nice, but the 16mm cavity is screaming for some attention;
Now it’s 20mm star compatible. The inside of the head has plenty of room to accommodate the larger star & wiring.
After some trial fitting, I knew the LED had to sit a little higher, so I added AU 1$ (92% copper 6% aluminium 2% nickel) to the pill & marked it out for drilling, after sanding it flat.
Extra holes were drilled for retaining screws, & I filed the Noctigon mounting holes to allow for a little movement to center the LED, & allow the chamfered screws to sit nice & low to avoid hitting the reflector base.
The reflector was next on the chopping block - I ground it down to open up the emitter hole, & also to get the right length so as it sat flush with the Noctigon board.
I was lucky enough to nab a few of the Direct Drive ‘East 92’ drivers recently, & decided to use one in this build. I just had to add a copper washer for the correct outside diameter. Silicone 22AWG wire was also added to lower resistance.
The switch also had the 22AWG treatment;
Here’s the assembled unit;
I initially tried an XP-G2 (de-domed) in this setup, but didn’t care for the beam profile, & it was extremely picky with the centering of the LED.
I ended up replacing it with an XM-L2 U2 1A, & whilst still being a pain to center well, gave a much nicer beam; bigger hot-spot & some decent spill as well.
How does it perform??
Using a Samsung ICR 26F, at 10m, it measured 600 lux easily, without having to ‘hunt’ too hard to find the hotspot, which works out to about 490 m of throw. With a ‘hotter’ battery it should go a little brighter
- edited - for correct numbers.