I found this in a drawer recently...
Once the crown jewel of my meagre flashlight "collection" it has seen its fair share of service. Still in good nick though but has sat unused in a drawer since my adolescence.
But tonight it takes a leap into a new millennium.
Here it is in all its disassembled glory. Those little colored discs are "filters" :-) Colored plastic lenses to add in case you need that sort of thing. I once thought it cool, as I did the morse signalling button.... And I still think so :-) Mua ha hah ha!
Those ladda nimh batteries are for size comparison.
Now it is introduced to the old P60 dropin. Long robbed of its SSC P7 led and transformed to other duties before it also was relegated to the convoluted system of drawers I have.
Staring at each other it is obvious that there is some attraction. Mated they shall be!!!
The face of the light opened up...
It seems almost ready. Positive in the middle and negative on the side. But perhaps too tight for comfort...
The original reflector for the incan bulb came out with a firm tug. Scrathed and worn it is. Though it is the first time it is out of the bezel.
The bezel too tight too.
Too tight indeed.
No amount of enticing will make it happen... Coercion will however.
You get the picture even though this depicts the wrong end :-)
This end was opened up to accept a single 18650 battery. While my AA nimh always seem to be in use when I need them I have more 18650 battteries of dubious quality from laptop pulls than... makes sense considering the meagre amount of flashlights I keep.
Head done.
The bezel could not be done like that since the threads would vanish. The reflector had a hard time with a bench grinder and now it fits well enough.
For the driver... That came out of another drawer. After being used in a test setup years ago this little nanjg 105C has been sitting idly and corroding. In any case it worked and had already had 2 amc chips removed for 2,1 A which I think will be fine even though there is no apparent heat path.
In fine I merely mean "not melt and desolder anything". Not "have almost no thermal drop" I don't care about that. Not now. Maybe IF I melt the host then I will. But not now.
Cleaned up an a tail spring installed. Amazing what alcohol does to appearances. Modes are set to HI/LO. This will be easy to disassemble and reflash and I am undecided about how to implement the morse button or if I even want to.
Here I realised that I should have had a picture of the XM-L2 C1 emitter that I glued in and how badly off centre it looked in that great big opening of the OP P7 reflector because I had forgotten why the darn thing was taken apart originally. The hole is off centre by 0,6 mm.
In any case I do not have that. Imagine it if you will. Show it I can not :-)
Now I merely inserted the thing and screwed the light back together.
And to take up the slack space that the two AA batteries leave when replaced by a single 18650 battery, I made this and wrapped in enough masking tape to make it sit firm and not rattle nor fall out on its own accord during battery changes. It can be shaken out if need be though.
You know what? It worked outright!
Here shown with green filter installed.
Another shot.
I probably should have lit something else up than green grass... That was not apparent to me at the time though.
But I did take one where I light up the dog in the distance. She is totally uncaring about her masters lights. Meatballs is another matter though.
Thanks for reading :-)
