Oh wow that’s a great deal and Amazon no less - just curious how you found out about the code, did you email Wurkkos and ask for one? The LED on this light alone is $30; surprised how Wurkkos could make a living with such big discount but it’s our gain :+1: .
The “murder bezel” LOL. You’re right my AliExpress version does NOT have the murder bezel and darn it now I want one! :smiling_imp: :confounded:
BTW if anyone is new to this hobby and just bought this light, temperature calibration and increasing max thermal limit to 50-55 C are ABSOLUTE must. Easy enough to do with Anduril 1, just ask this forum for help if necessary.
No problem man! I love saving money on lights too so I get it. Funny thing, I actually wanted the MDK bezel mainly for display/uniqueness. Was just about to pull the trigger on the wurkkos site just because I wanted to get one before gone and found this. Score.
Comparing mods in same light is definitely 100% doable with just the ceiling bounce method. Battery, bypass, driver wire upgrade, different drivers, AR lens, temperature of the host/battery esp for those using in winter months, all these comparisons.
For ceiling bounce, all these are very rough ballpark figures if you are talking about comparing different lights, but it’d work ok. We just make do with this quick and dirty method as it’s the easiest and most accessible to most, then we accept the drawback in accuracy. For better comparison between lights, best to build a lumen tube or box.
Just that i am plain lazy, and also i am not bothered between the difference between a 20000 lumen light and 25000 lumen light. So if the meter reads 2000 lux for light A and 2500 lux for light B, i just accept that it is reasonably true and it’s 20k lumens vs 25k lumens for them, and not think about spill angles affecting it. Coz ultimately if we’d also throw in other factors like heat sag, battery sag, and as you’d know all the pocket rockets we use can easily drop 30% in output from initial 0.5s to 30th second without us noticing that visually, it’s really a very complex matter.
In fact, i can only see the difference between my Sofirn Q8 Pro and JKK76 with a ceiling bounce with lights held 2 feet away from the ceiling (so the spill also do get bounced), on the meter the Q8 Pro is like 14k lumens and JKK76 25k in a relative comparative sense. I don’t really see the difference between my Amutorch DM70 vs my JKK76s, measuring 2000 and 2600 respectively on the meter in ceiling bounce, and esp since the DM70 sags slower and less than the JKK76.
So, have fun bro……maybe you’d hammer together a pvc lumen tube or something if you are really after the absolute accuracy when comparing lights.
Olight M2R Pro Warrior is another well known and very popular EDC. It remains one of my favorite walk lights because of its warm tone (CCT 4900k) and it doesn’t blind people walking in opposite direction. The optic is very well chosen by Olight: hotspot of Olight is wide (important to me for a walk light) and spill is dimmer than my lights with smooth reflectors, but not too bad. Just because I find it interesting, I reposted IF22a’s beamshot here so we could compare how the two TIR optics result in such different beamshots, and hence different purposes for the 2 lights. IF22a being an all-out thrower, Olight a more balanced all-purpose light.
Based on results against other lights so far, it’s obvious comparison with Wurkkos TS30S will be like bringing a knife to a gun fight. What the Olight does have is a nice warm tone, very rare for the throwy light (Another thrower with a warm tone? Convoy’s great M21F and M21E with Getian GT-FC40 4500k). Other than the warm color, it’s no fight at all as Wurkkos overwhelms Olight wrt brightness and throw.
Speaking of warm tone, while it doesn’t show here, the SBT90.2 LED beam color is warmer than Sofirn IF22a and Nitecore MH12S, both @ 6500k which is a very harsh blue, too harsh for my taste. The SBT90.2’s warmer tone is a pleasant surprise, very obvious with back to back comparison, and I love it. SBT90.2 is not as warm as Olight, and no Nichia when it comes to CRI, but heading in the right direction. I believe the CCT was measured to be around 5100k-5600k by djozz in this post here but not sure if it’s the same LED as what Wurkkos uses.
Got my TS30S this afternoon. Initial impressions are positive but I still have to wait quite a while for dark, and the little bit of playing I’ve done has been with a Convoy LiitoKala lii-50e cell. Seems to fall nicely between my Catapult V6 SST-70 and Convoy 4x18a SBT-90.2 as one would expect.
This bad boy heats up fast on turbo, so while I was/am considering picking up a few 40T’s on sale, I’m not sure how beneficial that really will be. The thermal calibration was off from the factory as expected, and the cell showed up with a lower than anticipated voltage of under 3.5v.
My hand-o-mometer indicates that the hottest part of this light is around the button, which makes sense considering that would be closest to where the LED is mounted. This is positive in that it seems to imply a good thermal path from LED to the body of the flashlight, but also seems to lead to significant heating of the battery tube where the light is held.
Edit: While I don’t intend to use the MDK bezel, the stock bezel seems to be on there extremely tightly. When I attempted to remove it, the light unscrewed from the pill section instead.
@Tatteredmidnight, your hand-o-meter is right . I have one of those IR thermometer guns that I use to check the lights, and yes the button is where I find the highest external temp.
BTW following are the results of how hot the lights are, 20 minutes after a Turbo start (once thermal regulation/step-down has kicked in):
Olight M2R Pro 36 C
Nitecore MH12S 43 C
Sofirn IF22a 43 C
Wurkkos SBT90.2 (max thermal limit set at 50 C) 45 C
It seems the Olight’s setting is too conservative and as result the light gets too dim, but there is nothing I could do about it since its UI is not Anduril. The Wurkkos with max temp limit set at 50 C measures close to the other lights, and that’s about as hot as I like it for holding. This is one huge advantage of Anduril in high-power lights - the ability to adjust temp limit to maintain and prolong brightness (less severe step-downs) while still keeping the light at reasonable temp, not too hot to hold. FWIW these are the 2 factors I consider in adjusting max temp limit.
I absolutely agree that Andruil has many advantages for us enthusiasts. I wish it were paired with regulated lights more often, but for pocket rocket like this, thermals are going to be the limiting factor before regulation anyway.
I disassembled the head today to get some measurements of the lens. The lights overall dimensions (and appearance) are very similar to the Convoy M21C/D, and it seems the dimensions of the lenses are within half a mm of each other. Based on this, I am going to order an AR lens from Convoy. Hopefully this will work well and improve performance just a touch more. I am also going to order a holster from Simon as I feel more comfortable having one for storage and if I want to pack it in a bag for travel. I will post my findings when I get these goodies, but it will likely be 3-4weeks at least.
AR lens is a great idea - an improvement in transmission without any penalty in heat production. I could measure with ceiling bounce method a 5-10% increase in light output using Samsung battery instead of Wurkkos for example, but I suspect the increased heat would lead to faster step-down. It’s a trade-off between brighter turbo, but faster step-down. (Basically IMHO I think of Samsung battery and spring bypass as a give and take mod particularly for a small high-power light like Wurkkos, when it’s all about the heat.)
I measured about 52-53 mm for diameter and 1.5-2 mm thickness for the Wurkkos lens - is that what you have? I’ve read great praises for the UCLv3 and UCLp lensUCL Lens - Flashlightlens.com - Online Store and like magic they happen to have the exact same dimension for UCLv3 and slightly thicker for UCLp lens.
I am about to order the UCLv3 or UCLp, anyone has any comment and advice before I click? The huge bonus is it should come pretty fast :-). I’ve found waiting for “toys” from China excruciating.
I busted out the Mitutoyo digital calipers (my initial measurements were using cheap, disposable, plastic calipers) and I got 51.5mm x 2.1mm for the original lens. I saw similar 52mm AR lenses but decided to go with the Convoy because from my measurements, 52mm is the absolute maximum possible size that will fit inside the head and not start to overlap the threads on the body.
Locking my calipers to 52mm and using the ID measurement jaws confirms that it is the absolute maximum diameter the head will accept (and canting them even a little, they hang up on the inner threads).There seems to be more wiggle room to go smaller though given the diameter of the inner lip in the head (which retains the o-ring), and on the shelf on the body.
Locking the jaws at the an 52.1mm, I am unable to get them into the head of the light, so given the +/1 0.13mm tolerance listed on the UCL site, it would be gambling that they are coming in slightly small. Based on this, I think the Convoy lenses are a safer bet, but I look forward to hearing your experience. I will try to get set up with imgur and post some shots for you, been too lazy so far.
I don’t know how precisely these Chinese lenses are ground diameter wise, but for how cheap they are, it might be worth it just to pick up the 52mm as well and try them both, the lead out time is more of an issue than the cost on these.
Regarding higher current cells, I reached the same conclusion, but I don’t have any higher drain cells. The cell here is acting to regulate the maximum output of the light, more current would likely have diminishing returns in visible throw (we don’t perceive brightness linearly, and emitter efficiency drops with current and heat). I’m not sure if the maximum turbo limit can be configured in Andruil, but using the included cell seems to be a cheaper and more convenient way to achieve this effect :D.
All things considered, for the price of this light, it’s proving to be a ton of fun to tinker with. I am a bit tempted to de-lens the emitter, but that may be too high risk given the cost of a replacement being half the cost of the light.
I share your sentiment about the wait from China, Simon makes it easy because I don’t have a domestic distributor for his stuff. I look forward to hearing how these work out for you, and if it goes well, I hope that there is a lot of consistency lens to lens if I go ahead and pick one of those up.
Re. max Turbo limit in Anduril, if I understand your question correctly: don’t think you could increase that limit in Anduril. With both Anduril 1 and 2 you could change the highest level so it equals Turbo, meaning now you could one-click to Turbo, but that’s about it AFAIK.
Thanks for the very helpful measurements. How convenient they do have 51.3 mm lens. I need another 5% output from the Wurkkos like I need a hole in the head, but this sounds like fun so I took one for the team and ordered the following:
I was thinking the other direction, limiting turbo output to accomplish the same thing as a lower drain cell, but yeah, I was out on a limb there. I would be very cautious about that 51.3mm lens, I don’t know how Acrylic would hold up to the heat this light kicks out on turbo. And this hobby isn’t about what we need, otherwise we’d have a few lights to suit our needs and move on, and we wouldn’t be refreshing this forum all day
So if the meter reads 2000 lux for light A and 2500 lux for light B, i just accept that it is reasonably true and it’s 20k lumens vs 25k lumens for them, and not think about spill angles affecting it. Coz ultimately if we’d also throw in other factors like heat sag, battery sag, and as you’d know all the pocket rockets we use can easily drop 30% in output from initial 0.5s to 30th second without us noticing that visually, it’s really a very complex matter.
and ordered the following:
