Im really a fan of BLF, doing a lot of reading here. Helped me with a lot of challenges and questions I had for batteries, LED stars, drivers, LED torches, bike lights etc… This is my first post because I couldn’t find a good answer for my challenge I have now.
I’ve bought this black Sky Ray 6xT6 more than a year ago from ebay. Used it a lot and it’s still doing great. However I have spare time left so I want to juice up the lumens on this baby. See the first pic (that I stole from an other member on BLF) that is exactly as my driver in the SR 6xT6 (without the blown resistor @ 3 o’clock).
I’ve changed the wires to the leds for thicker ones and that’s about it. Using 4 panasonic NCR18650PF cells I get about 4,9A tailcap readings on high.
Does somebody has a idea of modding this driver to get more amps->lumens out of it?
As for the resistors R4, R5 and R6, maybe change them with solder blobs will do no harm other than boosting the output? I have not a good clue on how the driver insides work, what part has his responsibilities etc… but I’ve seen almost exact the same driver with R000 resistors at R4, R5 and R6 (see last stolen pic).
Is there somebody that can give me some advice to juice up this light?
Did you do spring bypass mods yet? That helps a bit.
I don’t know anything about that driver, you could always try bypassing those resistors with a bridge. Depending on how much surgery you want to do, you could always try a direct drive FET driver and bypass the stock driver. Worst thing that I could see happening is the driver burns out if you bridge the wrong thing.
Spring bypass you just solder either a wire or copper braid to the top and bottom of the springs. Helps with lowering the resistance and increasing current capabilities.
Some drivers may not be happy with bypassing the resistors like that, and things like modes don’t work properly, LED glowing like it is in moonlight mode (for electronic switch, but your light comes with mechanical switch I think)… etc., and there is no known method yet to identify in prior whether or not a particular driver can be “resistor-bypassed” or not.
Safest way for this is by stacking additional resistors to it and see how that goes. By your pictures I guess those are 1206 size resistors.
Another important thing, are all the emitters in series? Or parallel? Without knowing this we also don’t know what does 5.2A mean. Because if all of the resistors are “000” it means the total resistance is pretty low already, so is it 5.2A or 2.6A to each emitter?
Keithd,
Thnx for the explanation about the spring bypass, I will do that too. What I’ve done with copper braid is soldered on top of each spring so it makes better contact with the battery “-”. I will put longer braids on them now and solder them on the base plate of the springs…
Bibihang,
The emitters are wired in parallel. The resistors are not “000” as the 2nd picture but mine is exactly like the 1st picture with 1x R200 and 2x R100 resistors.
