TRUSTFIRE A8 (26650 quad)
This is an older light that came out in the early days of the 26650. It’s certainly a well made light by the actual Trusfire company. Lot of attention to detail and beautiful machining. In fact, it had enough interest to have a BLF Edition group buy, then faded from memory, never to be mentioned or heard from again.
What happened? I don’t really know, but since it was the times before direct thermal path mcpcbs and FET drivers, it never really achieved its potential. Basically a very chunky light with an average beam and long run time.
Personally, I never liked the way they recessed the lens way down deep below the bezel. The same reason I don’t like the Convoy M2.
I was thinking of grinding down the bezel to a thin ring and bringing the lens forward, but I wasn’t sure about my capabilities of filing down stainless steel with my hand tools and perhaps wrecking the whole light, so I left it.
Time to get started on my balcony workshop.
It’s getting there.
For some reason, my calculations were off by 7mm, so I had to cut a second slug.
Although lined with a brass ring, the pill had one of those very shallow recesses for a press fit, so I built a mountain FET driver using one of the extra thin pcbs that RMM offers.
I drilled the hole through the center of the board myself to bring the positive lead up through the spring.
Just fiddling about and killing time
There! That thin PCB fits in there perfectly flush.
They even thought to add a nice delrin driver cover that threads in there. Very tidy.
Tpad with 4 x XP-G3 S5 3A and 22 AWG Teflon wires.
35mm Khatod quad optic sanded down to 30mm.
I knew my heatsink was tall enough, but when I had everything tightened down something was rattling around in there. The leg pins of the optic were a little too long for the Tpad so the apertures were standing too high above the emitters, so I just sanded them down a little.
All my 26650 were inside other lights, so I just used the only one I had available in my box. Some older green Sony cell.
It gave me 16A on high. Even with the light running, the larger 26650 cell seemed to have no problem holding at 16A on high with the FET driver.
Maybe not an everyday EDC light, but a good out of doors jacket pocket light.
You could try carrying it in your trousers but…
