Mod Month vs the Jacob A60

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 :slight_smile:

- edited - for correct numbers.

Completely off topic...

but I bet you used a Canon. :)

Yep, an old Powershot A2000is.

I’m no photographer…… :slight_smile:

Well done, thanks for sharing! It is very nice to see that you took care of almost all the possible improvements, including optimising the focus! It is quite an achievement that you managed to get the thrownumber with the XM-L2 even a bit better than with the stock XR-E !

What is the tail current by the way? And the luxnumber calculated back to 1 meter? (I ask this because 6klux at 10 meter calculates to 600klux at 1 meter which does not sound correct, the 490 meter throw calculates to 60klux at 1 meter, which seems more plausible).

I’m reading 3.6A at the tail - the battery is at about 4.1v.

Maybe you could help clarify with the readings I took - I’m no pro at this…
I have this meter , set on the highest range (200,000).

At 10m, I get a reading of 6 on the display.

Here’s the equation(if I have things straight);

lux = reading x distance squared
= 600 x (10×10)
= 60000.

The square root of lux at 1 meter (candela) times 2 gives throw in meters to 0.25 lux.

So:

60000 = 489.89 meters.

Am I going wrong somewhere? It’s getting late & I’ve had a few… :~

Ah thanks, that clarifies it, in the OP you mention 6k (=6000) at 10 meters, while it was 600.

3,6A at tail is really nice from a single Li-ion, here also not much room for improvement

I see…. :zipper_mouth_face:

OP edited with correct reading.

Cheers :slight_smile:

Love your mod. I’m not sure what to do with mine.

I was out distance testing with my standard A60 last night and I could just make out powerpoles to a max distance of about 460 meters (google measure) in perfect clear conditions. This is almost exactly the ANSI distance for a 52k lux light.

Great performance for a $14 light. The little A60s are certainly over-performers for the price. They make great wee rifle lights too.

Woah,

Nice mod, but I suspect you might have put the led a touch high. Running at 3.6amps a c8 is around 80,000 cd but of course is a touch smaller.

I have a similar mod in line for this week, only a 20mm sinkpad with xpe2 is sitting there for it :slight_smile:

De domed, stock, mine produces over 110,000 cd!

Chris

Thanks guys.

I initially had an XP-G2 in there, but had difficulty getting a decent beam profile, so swapped it for the XM-L2. I never got as far as taking any measurements with the XP-G2.

I think TomE had good success with an XP-E2 in the A60, maybe I’ll get one of those to try in there.

:beer: