This is the newest addition to my HDS "herd":
A very beaten up EDC Basic 60LE. It arrived with a beaten up inox bezel, a very scratched acrylic lens, and an almost new gen 1 battery compartment.
I replaced the o-ring in the head, the lens with a "genuine" HDS glass lens (from another U60), and it was good to go to the second stage "tuning", programming :devil:
When I bought it, I didn't pay attention to the "LE" part, meaning it always start on max, then double click is a lower level, another double click is an even lower level, and triple click is minimum (0,3lm)..
Being a basic, programming is 250+ clicks from off. So first I did a factory reset, to be sure to start from fresh, then 250 click to get to the programming menu, to disable the "force setting" option (on these old HDS, you can only set a brightness level by disabling the force setting option, switching the light on to the level you want to modify, than doing the 250 click routine to get to the brightness setting menu, and so on for each brightness level you want to modify).
So I did the 250 click once routine to disable the force setting option, once to modify the turn on level to an equivalent of the primary level on the "non LE" lights, then another time to set the low setting to the lowest level the light can do, then another time to activate pseudo momentary, and finally once again to enable the force settings, since you exit automatically the programming menu when enabling/disabling an option. I let you imagine how my thumbs were feeling after that!
Programming on newer light is much more user-friendly, and programming on Ultimate series was only 10 clicks instead of 250, so much more doable.
Anyway, after having it programmed to my tastes, it was put to edc duty, and soon I understood why it came with an acrylic lens!
It didn't even fall or whatever, I just switched it to maximum for a few minutes, and I heard a "crack", lens was shattered. On its defense, lens was perhaps weakened by some previous use, don't know, since it's 1,5mm thick it's not that easy to crack. Or maybe I tightened the bezel too much?
So a Novatac classic was chosen as organ donor, and the HDS got a new acrylic lens (gosh these scratch sooo easily! Or these late Novatac lens are crap), and a new glass lens with LDF went to the Novatac. And now the HDS is my new EDC, pretty funny since it's 10+ year old, but I like the "small" form factor compared to newer series.
Hope you enjoyed the story of this Basic 60LE!