I'd love to mod a Trustfire Z2. I want a driver with a much lower low, ideally under 5 lumens, get rid of the strobes, and maintain memory.
I haven't modded a light before though. I'd post good macro's, and take whatever measurements can be obtained with a multimeter and micrometer, maybe even a lux meter and hobby charger down the line. If you guys are willing to help a light modding newbie, I'll go ahead an order a second light to mod.
Do you know what driver size it uses? If it uses a 17mm driver you could order a 5 mode driver from E1320. It goes Firefly-Low-Med-High-Turbo.
A 17 mm driver can’t fit. A 15 mm driver might fit, but I’d have to remove a press fit part to know for sure. If you’re willing to help, I’ll go ahead and order another light for modding, then we’ll really know what’s in this light.
Sure, I'm willing to help. Beware there aren't that many 15mm drivers so it may be smart to wait until you find a suitable one before you buy another flashlight.
Thanks to the tiny driver that members here have created, I'll finally be able to modify this light soon. It's about time too. This mod has already taken two years!
https://www.google.com/search?q=“trustfire+Z2”
I finally cracked open mine, after the switch failed irrecoverably.
Could not get the white plastic press-fit battery contact thing out, finally drilled a couple of little holes to try twisting and it just fractured.
I think you’ll find takeapart pictures on a Russian site with that search string, but if not I can take pictures of the innards and measure them. Driver is barely 15mm or a bit over 14mm — it has three wires, 2-sided, just floating in there, near as I can tell. The failed switch just fell out, there’s a spring and a little lump of something I couldn’t identify. I suppose the third wire went to that.
Looks like it can be reassembled (tiny, tiny little LED board, just coated with heatsink gunk).
I just put a working Z1 head on the Z2 battery case (I like the Z1 three mode driver fine)
I was able to take one apart using one of the donors steve_vance generously donated for that purpose. I'll try to get some pictures posted tomorrow. It should be a pretty easy mod, aside from the tiny size. For the first one or two, I'll maintain the floating driver. If I make more, I may have custom pcb's made so I can mount the driver where the contact board currently sits. I'll be switching from XP-E to XP-G2 for the extra lumens.
"tomorrow" is today.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to mod it yet. Cereal_killer generously sent me some 10mm BLF pcb's that I was going to use in this light, but for some reason I didn't get them. I have replacement PCB's being made by Oshpark right now.
The first barrier is this bit of plastic and brass spring cap. Grab the brass with needle nose pliers and yank it out. All the nylon ring does is hold down the contact plate.
That gets you to the good stuff. The contact plate and the driver. The contact plate is in the background. It used to have a spring. I'm feeling lazy, but I believe that last time I measure these, the contact plate was 16mm in diameter, and the driver was 15mm. The driver floats, and only passes electricity through the wires. There's a positive and negative wire, and the two LED leads. But wait, shouldn't there be two more wires for the switch? Let's look at this side of the driver first, then we'll look for the missing wires on the other side.
Nope, they're not on that side either. That wouldn't make sense anyway.
We better look at the switch and figure out what in tarnation is going on. The top of the outer ring of switch and the white ring is supposed to be flush with the surrounding metal, but I didn't feel like pushing it back in because I'd have to push it back out, and it's quite a tight fit. Ignore the groove at the 2 o'clock position. I had started trying to cut the head apart to see what's inside before another member gave some tips that helped me take it apart without the carnage.
When the switch is pulled out, you see a tiny spring that the black wire from the driver was attached to. Note that this design actually includes the spring wire mod that many of us like to do, too bad they used hair thin wires. There's a hole in the white plastic, and through here you can insert a rod to push out the switch. You can also see two threads holes that were for the clip. Apparently this light isn't very waterproof thanks to these holes, especially if you remove the clip like I do.
This should explain things if you haven't already figured it out. On the right side is a metal tab that makes contact with the body of the flashlight, by which it connects to the negative side of the battery. Electricity passes through the un-anodized threads. Then the spring in the last picture sends electricity from the switch to the black wire that goes to the driver.
Here's where the mcpcb is mounted. The top of the pill is only 9mm in diameter and there's a groove right under where the LED goes for the leads.
The mcpcb is 8mm in diameter. I hope 10mm Sinkpads can be trimmed down, but sadly I can't try it out because I lost some of those too.
Lastly, the tailcap. It's just a wide spring making contact with bare aluminum at the bottom of the tailcap. I might copper electroplate both so I can do a spring wire mod from the top of the spring directly to the tailcap. Copper plating will eliminate the difficulty of soldering to aluminum.
you're the hero leaftye!, I never dared to start the Z2-mod, and finally gave the unmodded light away.
The 10mm Sinkpads can be trimmed down to 8mm, but they are also too thick; the threaded reflector of the Z2 grabs the body by just 1 full turn (on my unit at least, it is just one of the many badly designed features of the Z2), making the led-board any thicker than stock (=thin!!) will cause the reflector loose its grip entirely. Perhaps you have the means to bore out the hole a mm and still keep the surface flat? (I don't). In that way you also get rid of the ano under the board.
Thanks for letting me know. That's going to make modding even harder. I'll try stripping the anodization, plating with nickel, filling that hole under the LED with solder and drilling out the side of the hole more for the leads to go through. I might try milling it a little deeper with my drill press, but I've never done anything like that before. It's a good thing I have a donor to practice on, eh? I'd feel a lot more comfortable doing that with the X-Y mill table that comfychair recommended though, and even more comfortable if I got a rotary vise, but those would cost more for modding than I want to spend right now. So that makes filling the hole with solder and filing the mcpcb thinner and less wide sound a lot more acceptable.
I put my Z1 head on the Z2 battery tube and like the result (the Z1 has mode memory, bless its little heart).
If you want another cracked-open Z2 head with driver, LED, and bad switch (the switch was intermittent, which is why I cracked it open), I’d be glad to send it your way.
Thanks, I may need that extra head. Machining the Z2 head will be one of my first drill press machining attempts, and that makes what I want to do awfully ambitious. Heck, I might be able to do everything right the first time and have an extra head to fix, mod and give away. I'll send you a pm.