Yes mmander those look great and show the reason I prefer the NW, and where are you posting the other beamshots?
Sharpie,
I am not going to go and get all educated now about anodizing and insulative values… I love your knowledge and experience with things electrical here, but the point is, I have an almost year old Thorfire TG06 that I swap batteries in almost daily. It had good anodizing, but not as good as the Cometa/Jax, and it still locks out after umpteen tailcap removals and driver swaps and other such things. Anodizing on this light is good, and worse anodizing has held up for me before. This is perhaps ignorant to someone like you, but works for me…
The point I was simply trying to make was not that the one member here did not have a short, but that the bigger hazard is the pill/spring/26650 interface. The red herring is the short up front, the dead driver in another…. These are distractions from the major issue, the light/battery melt down that shorting a 26650 directly can cause. What I see is if you are going to get into the light to remove the pill, insulate the front of the leads under the “centering ring” while you are there, but if all you want to do is drop a gasket from a cottage cheese container lid into the back and throw in a 26650, you have a high chance of this being the only issue on the light. I am not minimizing those other defects by any means, I would be ticked and report the issues here for others to know. I just am mainly worried about someone having a bad time from a directly shorted battery. By bad time, I mean a vented light, or fire or other hazard that LiIon can create with a dead short…
You will know the DD light from a short from the negative lead to the light, it will only have one mode, but the LED will keep the voltage from runaway. If there was a + lead to ground fault, and you had a gasket in the front, the immediate action of unscrewing the tail, even a 1/4 turn will deactivate that fault (NO LIGHT EMITTED, same as pill fault). Thus we are relying on the anodizing being insulating on both ends of the light.
Trouble shooting/proofing this light is as follows for me:
1. Cut non conductive gasket from cardboard (my use initially), plastic or other non conductive material. Center hole about 10mm (3/8”) is the most important part, this needs for just the spring to protrude, and does not have to go all the way down (spring will compress with insulator gasket on it). The outside should be just smaller than the battery tube. Insert gasket before battery.
2. Screw on tail cap, watch for tail button to light up when tail cap is fully screwed down. If tail cap is screwed down and NO light is from either tail button or front of light (may be on moon mode, so have a way to see this quickly like a mirror) IMMEDIATELY unscrew tail cap and check springs for heat/melting.
3. If tail cap button lights up, press button while preparing to unscrew tail cap. If no light is seen from front of the Cometa, IMMEDIATELY unscrew tail cap and check for hot springs and any signs of trouble (smell, hot battery, etc). If light is seen roaring from the front of the Cometa (or not, could just be a trickle in moon mode), check to see if you can change modes by bumping the tail button. If no mode change, unscrew tail cap and try again. If modes change, go enjoy a kick butt light… marvel in the zoominess….
4. If light is DD and only one mode (kick butt lumen output, or stupid bright for those non flashaholics), remove battery and then remove bezel, lens and centering ring after removing battery to check for short on MCPCB the LED is mounted on. If no short found, insulate leads and try again. If this single high brightness mode occurs again, remove pill and driver ring, check driver and carefully center driver before reinstalling driver ring. Try again… If failure at this step occurs again, request a new driver…
5. Any issues, report them here and to Banggood via opening a ticket. They are the sellers and shippers, but need to be dead in their suppliers fifth point of contact when stuff like this happens…
Anything I may have missed, lets add to this to help the less technically inclined in making sure they do not harm the light, or worse yet, themselves. Regardless of the shoulda-woulda-coulda situation, what this is, is what it is, safety should be first from here on out…
I did put 18ga silicon leads on one of mine today, barely got the centering ring back on…. I will get some amp readings tomorrow at work. It looks brighter, but that may be the V3 2B XPL HI I had left over from a purchasing frenzy at mountain electronics a while ago…