A short while ago I posted about buying a (partially) broken Lumintop Tiger flashlight, which had gone under the radar for me, in this topic below:
I wasn’t aware of the fact that this light existed for a (very short) while and after trying to dig up some more information/experiences/reviews/videos, I came to the conclusion that there is very little to be found about it. (Here is the link of the Tiger on the Lumintop website: TIGER (Discontinued) - Lumintop)
Since I have to take it apart anyway, to do some repairs on it, I thought it might be interesting to create a dedicated topic for it and to include some (extra) teardown photos of this rather ‘rare’/‘obscure’ light!
First a couple of general photos of the Lumintop Tiger, to get a better idea of this ‘chunky flashlight’:
The photo below shows, besides the size comparison of the heads with the Q8 Plus, the main issue/deffect it was sold with; The center LED (XHP70.3 HI) is partially burnt and has to be replaced:
And let’s now get to the part of dissasembling the flashlight:
The first thing was getting the bezel off and given the big size and therefore the potential of a lot of glue, I was expecting the worst…
I decided to start with a really simple attempt of just using really grippy rubber gloves and to see if I would have enough grip (and strenght) to force the bezel off and to my huge surprise (and at the max strength I was able to generate) the bezel slowly started signs of movement! In the end there was some glue applied by Lumintop, but (way) less than I was expecting.
Below a photo of the MCPCB, showing the burned XHP70.3 HI, a locating screw/post which goes into the reflector (preventing rotation of the reflector when screwing the bezel on) and some very beefy 12 AWG wires:
The reflector itself is (as expected) nicely machined out of one solid block of aluminum:
On the other side of the head, where the driver resides, I noticed something that surprised me: the driver was marked as a GT4 Texas Avenger by @Texas_Ace and running NarsilM by @Tom_E. This was weird to me, since the Tiger was advertised as running Anduril 1.
After looking on the Lumintop website, I did found an image (the 2nd one below) which also shows this driver, so apparently Lumintop have partially reused (and adapted) this driver for the Tiger.
(I will remove the driver completely at some later point, to also show a picture of the other side.)
The Tiger is powered by 4x 21700 flat tops (max 71mm length), but the battery compartment differences from some other lights in that it doesn’t use a battery carrier or that you can freely swap batteries by unscrewing one of the 2 sides of the battery tube. Instead, the batteries need to be inserted on the side where the meet the head of the flashlight and then are ‘locked into place’ by screwing in the contact side/disc with 4 screws, so removing or swapping batteries will always require a tool/screwdriver.
Above you see the top/driver side battery pcb and the central stem/post that goes through a center whole of the bottom battery pcb, so make contact with the onboard charging module in the tail of the flashlight.
When you unscrew the (very chunky!) tailcap, you encounter the onboard 2-way/bi-directional charging system, which according to Lumintop supports a wide variety of charging protocols and up to 100W charging:
As you can see in the photo above, the charging module is only slightly raised, so I was wondering how I would be able to get that out. It turned out that it was only “loosely” screwed in, so with my bare fingers pushing on the silver/aluminium ring I was able to unscrew it:
This way I was able to reach lower battery pcb and unscrew it:
On the photo directly above, you can see the (clever) way that Lumintop has essentially installed a spring bypass by installing a sort of tab, which is directly soldered to the PCB and therefore bypassing the spring.
There is an issue though, in that the springs seem to be compressed too much and sort of collapsed, basicly have almost no travel anymore. This causes some issues with the EVE 50PL that I intend to use in this light. They are within the length limits Lumintop stated, max. 71mm unprotected cells, and my 50PL being 70,10mm, but not making contact. I estimate that I need at least 1,5-2mm extra height to make battery contact with the springs in its current state. (The previous owner stated that he used button tops, which extra length could explain the over compressed springs)
I will post more (detailed) photos and specific information when I get further along into repairing the flashlight. If someone has questions or a request of specific photos of certain things, please feel free state them below in this topic.
