While discussing the good old Ultafire WF-008 XR-E recoil thrower here, Agro found a aliexpress source for a clone of this old-school thrower and so I bought one a while ago. Looks cheap but so was the Ultrafire, and the (glass! :+1: ) mirror looks like it had better times but it is good enough to me.
It has been mentioned many times over the years but I never saw it happening: modding it with a different led. And to be honest, still the XR-E is hard to beat: very throwy and relatively small beam angle, the WF-008 seems tailor-made for this led. I gave it a go anyway, with a White Flat, knowing that the beam angle is wider and light is wasted outside the mirror, but hoping for enough output overkill to still beat the XR-E.
The XR-E is huge, and in this flashlight it is not mounted on a board but directly with its central thermal pad on a small brass pillar, with the ledwires hand-soldered to the pads on the led itself. The White Flat is much smaller and although the brass pillar can be adapted (with some very fine soldering :weary: ) to direct mounting, I chose for adding a ledboard, an adapted 10mm DTP board (bought it some time ago from ASF which is vestureofblood’s store), the total size is almost the size of the original XR-E. The led was reflowed and the board soldered on the pillar in one go with the blowtorch.
Then the pillar was seated in place in the hole in the aluminium frame, the lens was put in place too, the wires connected to a ledtester and then the focus could be checked on the wall. It appeared that with the pillar as far in the hole as it would go, the led was still not in focus. So the ledboard was unsoldered from the pillar, the head of the pillar filed mostly off and the board soldered back on top of the pillar. With the pillar fully down in its hole, now the focus was good.
The aluminium cap that fixes the mirror is press-fit, and so is the driver . I chose a 6x7135 (2.1A) Jaxman driver that was in my junkbox. The heatsinking of this setup is minimal (the mirror-led-assembly is held in place with a spring, P60 style) so I reckoned I should moderately drive the led.
Finished:
The beam:
The mirror does really good imaging btw, here an overexposed pic of the beam in which you can even judge my soldering :person_facepalming: :
I indeed measured 2.13A with a clamp meter on the tail, 230 lumen makes its way out of the light which is probably not much better than the XR-E, and the output is not dropping fast so the heatpath is good enough. As you can see, a lot of side-emitted light is not hitting the mirror, still I measured a throw of 51 kcd. But stupid me forgot to measure the stock light so I do not know if it is improved :person_facepalming: . And guess what, this recoil type light is so old that no-one on CPF or BLF ever measured actual throw numbers :weary: (luxmeters were not common 8 years ago)
So I just ordered an extra copy from aliexpress to make the comparison, to be continued.