Mod practice: Looking for cheapo flashlights that can take an 18mm LED emitter

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

I have a bunch of these leftover 18mm generic LED emitters.

Fasttech claims the LED star is 20mm, but I measured the diameter at 18mm. Also, despite the product title that says they’re Cree XR-E, you can see in fasttech’s pics that they’re NOT XR-Es.

I want more practice on my flashlight modding skills. Do you have any suggestions on super dirt-cheap flashlights that you know for sure will take at least an 18mm LED star? If the flashlight has a shelf in it, that would work. If the flashlight has that ring around the edge to hold up the LED star (like the SK68 clones), that won’t work unless the diameter is also 18mm.

Thanks in advance.

2

Convoy C8 or Eagle Eye X6 hosts take 20mm stars, but the LED is crap, even a XP-G2 for 1.5$ will do better than this LED

3

Yeah, I know. This is more about the practice and learning from modding. I’m hoping for flashlights cheaper than a C8 or X6. I already have those.

4

If you want gain practice you can try to dedome and reflow

5

Yeah, I can add those to my list of things to try.

6

You could mount them on a hunk of aluminum and create a lamp out of them with a cheap power supply off ebay. Would make for a nice shop light as well mounted in the shop or something.

7

That’s what I call thinking out of the box, or out of the flashlight tube. Yeah, I can try something like that once I finish my current list of flashlight mods. My brain has been thinking of ways to make these not-that-bright generic LEDs useful.

8

It is not worth using these in a flashlight but as a lamp they could work well. Just find an old power brick from something to get DC power and then get yourself a constant current regulator off ebay for under $5 and you are good to go with some scrap aluminum.

9

Look like old xre’s. They make decent throwers as long as the current is held down. Also, the +/- contacts are on both top and bottom and large enough to solder to directly so you don’t even need a star. You can file off the bottom pads except for the heat pad and solder it straight to a brass or copper pill. One of my early mods was sort of like that. Direct drive- led- and heat pad both soldered to the pill and plus wire to top of led. ~2.4A XRE with a non zoomie 10440 host. The Utitech AAA. I suspect either the switch or led has by now been fried since it was a cheap host GAW.

10

Nope. I checked. The round metal circle looks like an XR-E, and it does fit in an XR-E gasket I had from one of my cheapo zoomies. But there should be a square inside.

11

SK98s take both a 20mm driver and 20mm emitter. Odd little puppy…

12

It’s definitely not a Cree, but it’s probably a knockoff distributed-phosphor LED. Ie, instead of a blue chip with phosphor coating on the surface (and clear epoxy filler), it’s a nekkid blue chip with the phosphor mixed into the epoxy (or whatever’s used).

On my… damn, can’t remember which light it is… but when I put an aspheric lens over it to project an image of the chip onto the ceiling (improvised zoomie), you’ll just see a white circle, and eventually be able to focus the bond wires in the image.

Find the oldest cheapest LB flashlight you can, and see if it looks all-yellow in the window.

Oh! I think it’s the 1W “upgrade” for MiniMags. Nite-Ize? The little doodad that looks like a thick black poker-chip with the LED mounted on top and 2 stiff leads sticking down.

—

Just looked…

Check out the XB-E chips. Cree calls it “remote phosphor”, claims something like 20% gains. (It’s in a .pdf, so can’t quite c&p the text.

Go crazy…

13

Thanks. Just threw a couple of those to my never-ending wishlist.

14

I think what every one is trying to say. Practice but buy an emitter that will make you happy and work in a flashlight so its useful to you :smiley: You can find cheap XML2s on Fasttech you wont get 10 for that price maybe 4-5 max but they will be more useful. You can also find cheap drivers on Fasttech.

I bought some of these and they are good the performance is great.
Driver
https://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10001713/1124800-2500ma-5-mode-led-flashlight-driver-circuit
XPG3
https://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10027830/6080507-cree-xp-g3-s3-1a-777lm-6000-7000k-led-emitter

For smaller lights 17mm driver is more common unless you buy like an Ultrafire.

15

Oh, I appreciate the advice, but I’m already doing that.

I have several varieties of 3000K Cree LEDs (XP-E, XP-E HEW, XT-E, XM-L, XM-L2, XP-L) of varying sizes (14mm, 16mm, 20mm) and a few 3500K XM-L2, several 1-mode generic drivers of varying current, several Nanjg drivers which I haven’t tried yet, several Ultrafire P60 style hosts, several P60 pills, 2 Solarforce hosts, and Fujik thermal paste, and that’s all from fasttech. And from mtnelectronics, I just got some forward clicky switches and some 15mm drivers of varying currents to stick into my SK68 clones.

So far, I’ve built 3 P60 style flashlights from some UltraFire hosts (black WF-501B, purple WF-501B, black WF-502B). I’ve also modded several existing flashlights by swapping the LED: Eagle Eye X2R to 3000K XP-L, another Eagle Eye X2R to 3000K XM-L2, Convoy C8 to 3500K XM-L2, Eagle Eye X6 to 3500K XM-L2, Tank 007 to 3500K XM-L2, 2 cheapo Meco zoomies to XT-E 3000K, and 2 more cheapo Meco zoomies to XM-L2 3500K. And on my list of flashlights to mod: A couple of Crelants, Lumintop SD10, Sunwayman C22C, Sunwayman R20A, some Romisen zoomies, and all 6 of my SK68 clones.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m nuts about 3000K. :smiley:

The story behind these “XR-E” LEDs is that I wanted one to change my Cofly KX-398 zoomie, which had a cool white 20mm XR-E. I had hoped that these generic XR-Es would be close enough in terms of brightness. But the actual problem was that they were 18mm, not 20mm. The Cofly doesn’t have a pill where you put the star on top. It has a ring indent around the tube which the outer edge of the 20mm emitter star sits on, just like an SK68. So the 18mm star is too narrow to stay in place

With a 10-pack, I knew I’d have a bunch of these leftover, so I wanted to stick them into some cheapo hosts just for fun. Now Texas_Ace has given me the idea of building a lamp or something that’s not a flashlight, which is something I’ve never done before, but hey, it’s something new to learn!

16

On a big honkin’ backplane, you can just drill 2 holes each for the stars you intend to use, then wire them in series. Ground one end to the backplane, then figuring out how much Vf you need to drive the string, then use a simple resistor as a ballast to limit the current. So if 4 at 3.2V each gives you 12.8V, you can drive it from a 15V supply, have a 2.2V difference, then for pushing 1A through them, that’s a 2.2Ω resistor.

To quote Sam Axe, easy-peasy.

(To use 8 instead of 4, make 2 parallel strings, but me personally, I’d put a resistor on each string instead of just parallelling everything and using 1 resistor.)