My name is Ken from Katy, Tx. I been bitten by the lumen bug and have to say its been a great past few months of learning and meeting a lot of great people with similar interests. I have many lasers and flashlights that are, to say the least, not what ordinary people view as such. Im sure all of you know exactly what I am saying! Is there a photo gallery that I can make with my profile settings? I would love to share my projects with everyone.
One of my best lights to date is a Fenix TK-70. I reflowed 3 cree xml2 emitters on the 1 piece copper triangle sink pad, did a copper braid spring mod, and cleaned up all the poor contact sufaces on the host. Tailcap current with (3) 10000mah nimah was 9.56A. Im happy with that with the stock driver unmodified.
My best laser is a 3.4 watt 445nm in a C8 host. I believe is has a G2 lens, I dont remeber. I have lit fireworks with it from about 14 feet.
Hi Ken, welcome. You could probably add a link to your signature line for your photo gallery and/or articles (JohnnyMac and others I believe do something similar). I'd be interested to hear what specific things you did to clean up poor contact surfaces on the TK70, though I'm not planning on doing a TK70 shortly, I'm sure other lights I work on have similar issues. 9.5 amps sounds pretty awesome.
Welcome to the family, Ken!! Your TK70 sounds like a great mod and your laser...WOW! Me likey!! Lighting fuses from 14ft away is outstanding. I could get into all SORTS of trouble with that puppy. :bigsmile:
As for photo galleries, we have none hosted on the server here but we all pretty much use free photo hosts like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasaweb and others. Those are the two I mainly use.
I have had the TK-70 for a couple of years. Then out of the blue it started acting up on me. It would intermittent turn off and somtimes I would have problems with it turning back on. Thats when I started doing reasearch on problems with the TK-70. I found a lot of links on switch problems with the light. So I attempted to take mine apart and found it was impossible to take apart by hand! They use some type of adhesive unlike locktite to seal the threads I guess. After a bit of heat and some strap wrenchs, I was able to get it apart. I inspected all the connections in the switch/driver assembly and the only problem I found was a lot of cosmolene or waxy substance between the driver and the case. Oh there was also a small piece of loose solder between them too. I cleaned it all up reassembled it with a dab of thermal grease on the head threads and whala! Perfect!
So after I got it working properly, then I started looking into modding it. First mod was the copper braid on the spring and then I reflowed some xml2 emitters. I wish I would have checked current before and after. Maybe one of the members can check current with (3) fresh charged tenergy 10000 mah batteries for me? I also use some powerex 11000mah too.
