I built an “Ultrafire 3P”, a clone of Surefire 3P. The head and tail are low quality Surefire knockoffs from the local second hand market, and the body is from Ultrafire 504A, uses 16340. If not using 504A for the body, you can buy a 18350 compatible 3P clone body separately, but that’s a bit expensive for me. Of course, 16340 is a bit embarrassing for sure, especially since I swapped to Convoy driver and can’t even use CR123A. The batteries I randomly bought Vapcell T6 and T9.
504A is actually pretty much like the 3P already, except for the poor finish and the tailcap isn’t a raised button, I wish the buttons were raised. The switch on the knockoff is an old-school aluminum ingot momentary switch, I swapped it with a 20mm PCB and forward clikcy switch.
the drop-in I used is the most common kit, and I chose a Convoy 5A BUCK. Had a little trouble soldering the driver to the drop-in, I had to use some desoldering wick/braid to get them together. The switch and driver springs were swapped to Hank’s beryllium copper springs.
For the emitter I used a discontinued CULNM1 as I wanted to do a pocket thrower, although the end result wasn’t so ideal. Possibly due to heat dissipation issues, there was only 70-80kcd at 5A and also 60-70kcd at 2.5A (50% mode), so I have no more reason to keep using the 5A mode, and set the driver to group 9. Maybe another day I’ll use some thermal pads or copper foil to improve the heat dissipation.
edit: I don’t really like using those “W aliases”, anyway, it doesn’t seem to be worth it to specifically swap CSLNM1 to CULNM1, there’s not a lot of visible improvement, especially if you can’t get some at a low price.
There was heavy fog when I was going to beamshoot one day, and I used a yellow filter for some of the photos. I’ve talked about this before, it can’t help much you see clearly in the distance, but it can at least reduce blindness from the reflection of fog.
As a comparison is my Convoy M2, after it swapped to sapphire lens, the candela is about 90-100kcd.
Some beamshots in the fog.
