A little music while you read,
http://www.youtube.com/embed/-bwv1Ufulos
Well you already know I am going to mod the TR-A9. I'm not going to do a whole lot with it. It will have an XM-L2 T6 3C in it, with a DrJones driver and I probably.... maybe.... possibly.... won't drive it too awful hard. I'm not even sure if it will be 4XAA in series or 4X14500 in parallel yet. I guess I will just wing it and see what flies. I want to make it bright, but manageable and an everyday user.
Hare's the light broken down to it's basic components. The "pill" houses the led, driver, smd switch and the back side of the driver is the upper contact plate.
The star is glued down with adhesive, (probably Fujik). The heat sink is aluminum, but I don't think it's anodized. I think it's painted black. I will know for sure later on.
With the driver off, you can see inside the pill. It's hollow for the driver and it's fairly thin. I will need to work on that a little.
Driver
The back side of the driver board is the upper contact plate.
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I worked on the light some more tonight and I also want to show how the heat sink/pill fits in the light and where it makes body contact.
The pill is in the body.
Without the body. You can see the areas where the pill sets in. There's three of them (only two shown here). The fourth is cut away more, for the switch.
I stripped the driver components and soldered on the pos and neg so I can wire to the new driver. (That's some ugly AA that I gobbed on the solder joints, just before it got too hard).
The contact plates were already modified. If I didn't know better, I would say the original set-up was 4S not 2S/2P. I didn't have to do a thing here.
The pill is back together. I added a few grams of metal inside it. Wired up the DrJones driver, with 2 extra chips, so it will be over 3.5 amps and buttoned it all back up.
I didn't change the led, since this is already an XM-L2 and the tint wasn't bad at all in the stock light.
Tested and ready to go...
Tomorrow (today), I can do the cosmetic mods and finish the light. It will now run on 4xAA NiMHS in series.
Here's the finishing shots. The light is done.
That's it. It turned out well and it wasn't hard to do. I used Fujik around the pill so when I pushed it in, it would make better contact with the body. I still think it would be a better light for an MT-G2 than the EA4 would be.
Beam Shots
These are all mouseovers. I used the shots from the original A9 and the modified A9.
The MODIFIED light Photos are Mouse Out and the Original photos are Mouse Over. The same settings were used in both shoots.
I think I done good. It's brighter than stock. It heats up Fast. That tells me the heat is getting to the body like it should.
That's all Folks.
