Last weekend i got to repair a mag-lite 5-D with sentimental value for a friend. This needed to happen reasonably fast and on a budget so instead of buying the parts that needed replacing i managed to pick up a free donor light locally with stuck battery…… after pulling all the parts for the repair i was left with a bunch of left over maglite bits so i decided to dig into the ol kitchen sink to see if i could build something and i’m more than happy with the end result!
The build started with an old GU5.3 10W 300K Philips 36D spot light i found at a thrift store a couple months back for 30 cents a pop. I took the board, optics and heatsink and cut it to size for the mag head and zombified the board with the 4 Rebel leds (which im guessing are LXM3-PW71) rewired in parallel for low voltage use. Dug up some old driver board (a horrible one at that, marked as yn-20-t8 no idea where i pulled that out of) and stuck that on the back on the heatsink doing my best to keep the total sandwich as low profile as possible.
The philips light had active cooling that had to go but the vent hole in the middle now gives a nice view of the driver board thats behind it. The heatsink holding the led board and optics is held down with two left over pieces of toothed belt from my 3d printer and clamped into the head with some left over gpu thermal pads to aid in heat dissipation and it works surprisingly well! Everything is wired up with wires ripped out of an old ethernet cable.
The Maglite head is one of the old ones with a nice fat ‘stop lip’ for the tube so i decided to remove the anodization on the inside of it and clean the top of the tube as well so i could turn it into a nice reliable and short twisty light!
Not the cleanest job ever but plenty good for the girls i go out with 
And it works brilliantly like that so eh……
Next I cut the tube into pieces removing the middle bit with the switch part that was completely mangled from the stuck and leaking batteries leaving just the two threaded ends and a couple centimeters of actual tube. I bent a metal tie-wrap in a circle to sit snug on the inside to help align the two pieces and glued everything together with some jb-weld. Also drilled two opposing holes in the mating surfaces of the tube walls to press a coper rod in (piece of old solid core wall wire) to aid in keeping it all electrically conductive, jb-weld doesn’t conduct at all. Next i put a nice compressible spring in the bottom of the tailcap so the battery can sit all the way down in there to keep the length down even more…. and it turned out really nice and short;
Just over 10cm in total yet able to fit up to 7,5cm long cells, dont know if protected 21700’s are a thing (i only have unprotected ones) but they will probably fit in there just fine.
I didn’t plan to spend any money on this but i fell in love with this form factor so i could not help myself and ordered a nice proper driver board that will go in as soon as it arrives.
The light is absolutely great with the traffic cone too, it even fits backwards for a really…. silly light;
(yes my old cone is very worn and wallered out)
Compared to a 6-D its quite a comically small little boi
The output of the leds with these optics is genuinely marvelous, its absolutely not the brightest thing in the world but the light has a very pleasing near amber color, it has a well defined hotspot of about 2m at 8m distance with plenty spill to be useful as an actual flashlight. Right now its a 3-mode with high at just over 3A, a 700mA med and strobe but that 3A is a bit high for my liking and that strobe also needs to go die in a fire… This is not a power monster so itll soon have a 2200mA max driver with proper regulation.
Moral of the story; If you can get a free maglite or other solid base you should absolutely open your box of old junk and see if you can cobble something together. You might be surprised what little gem you might be able to make with an afternoon of tinkering!
