I finally finished building the 3D Maglite! I can't believe how far I've come since I posted this thread... I hadn't soldered anything yet and now I've built dozens of lights and soldered hundreds of 7135 chips!
I built this using an old and slightly worn Maglite. My goal was to build something a bit different that was highly functional and could utilize alkaline or rechargeable cells, either D or AA. It is a Christmas gift for my father-in-law. I am actually really happy with how it turned out. This reflector is just awesome with the XM-L2! A nice focused hotspot with TONS of spill!
I will post a full build review, but here's the summary:
-XM-L2 U2 1C on aluminum
-qlite driver @ 3.04A (low voltage warning/shutoff disabled)
-Running on 6xAA Eneloops inside of three D adapters
-22 AWG silicone wire.
1. Used this as my pill/reflector. I ground down the outside of the reflector so that it would fit inside of the mag's head. I radiused it so that it would make as much contact as possible with the Mag's head. I left it a little long so that the lens cap would exert lots of pressure on it to keep good thermal contact.
2. I cut the top of the brass pillar off to make room for the "drop in". I soldered the positive wire directly to the existing positive post and soldered the negative wire directly to the brass sliding ring.
3. I had to run some wire braid across the tail spring and add a small "bump" to it so that it would make contact with the narrower negative pole on the 2 AA to D adapters I'm using.
4. For the LED, I soldered two copper discs together as a riser so that the reflector's pill could be tightened down tight onto the MCPCB. I used some Fujik in between the LED and riser and between the pill and copper discs.
5. For the driver, I removed the positive spring and soldered the switch positive directly to the driver. I also soldered the negative/ground to the outside ring of the driver. I potted the whole thing in Fujik so that it would stay in place and to prevent any possible short circuits that may occur. I disabled the low battery warning/shutoff by removing the R2 resistor, I did this so that you could use all of the available power in an alkaline or nimh cell.
Fired it up and everything works great! The beam is nice and the battery life is great! I am still pretty enamored by the beam, it is just much nicer than I thought it would be. I ran it on 6xAA on high for three hours and it was still going but getting pretty dim. It maintains really good brightness for around 1.5 hours on high but doesn't really start to drop off hard until around 2.5 hours. The get gets warm but not too hot.