Has anyone fried a 5W LS going direct drive

I was wondering if any one fried a 5W LS yet going direct drive with 9 volts (3-cr 123 or 6 AA) I have heard a lot about people going direct drive with the blaster VI. I just modded a mag light using 3-CR123's when I checked the current draw at the tailcap with a Fluke 77 I got 1.3 amps /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif
I was just wondering if any one has any input on direct driving the 5W.
Thanks Bill

I used 6 AA NiMH cells with 0.5 ohms, no problem even with "hot from the charger" cells. I don't think I would direct drive it, may draw too much current in the first few minutes of runtime. With 0.5 ohms, initial current draw is about 1A, dropping quickly to ~800mA (with NiMH)
Rob

Made and sold nearly a hundred, all direct drive using absolutely no resistors (except a little proprietary internally built-in resistance, if I told ya I'd have to kill ya), no failures yet except a few in which I had to replace the Luxeons when people used RECHARGEABLES against my advice. I recommend alkalines only...

I have one of Mr Bulk's Space Needle IIs. On three fresh SF123s, I measured 1.96 Amps into the 5W LS and 7.05 volts across it. Or, I guess that was across the series combination of the LS and the mystery resistance. That would normally seem excessive to me, but I believe Charlie knows what he's doing. It's a beautiful light, BTW.

Charlie, you don't have to tell me where it is or what it's made of, but can you tell me how much it is? The resistance, that is.

never fried one...but did manage to seprate the slug from the die and the rest of it when attempting a transplant! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

the die is sort of crackled...i haven't tested output yet, but if the output is the same, i should be about to make a flashlight with one thermal joint /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Ok guys thanks I measured about .25 ohm resistance in the mag before I started the mod don't know if it is coming from the switch or what but the heat sink seems to be pulling the heat away from the LS ok the head gets pretty warm. I guess I'm good to go this thing is pretty bright.
Thanks again Bill

About .1 to .15 ohm in addition to the internal resistance of the big Mags themselves.

Thanks Charlie. I like to understand what's going on inside as a way of explaining the shape of run-time curves.

I hadn't thought about the Mags' internal resistance. Something new for me to measure. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Thanks for the measurements, Paul_W !! So that's about 14 WATTS !!!! That's just a "little bit" overdriven. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

I was wondering how it kept up alongside the incandescents when Brock was doing a comparo.

And each 123 cell is dropping down to 2.33 volts because of the current. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif

Oh - That was Brightnorm, not Brock that did the comparo.

Anyone tried any measurements as to how many Lumens the SNII is actually thrusting out because it's hovering at 14-15 Watts instead of the retorted 5Ws?

An X-rated 5W can reach 250 lumens... Wonder what a screaming 15W W-rated LS can end up at...
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif

I compared my Space Needle II (V-bin running at 1.96 A) with my M3 with HOLA. Using the bounce-from-the-ceiling method so as to more closely approximate the total light output, I measured 12.8 for the SN2 and 21.5 for the M3. This gives an estimation for the number of lumens.

Since the M3 HOLA is advertised at 225 lumens, you could conclude that the SN2 is somewhere in the neighborhood of 135 lumens.

Every step up in bin size adds another 30%, so on the average a W-bin LS, similarly driven, would put out 175 lumens. (? ? ? ?) . . . starting to get more iffy here. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Paul, I thought all Space Needle IIs were W-binned...? Unless Charlie mated yours to a V-bin...
/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif

Naw. He tries for Ws but evidently they're not that easy to get. Coincidentally, there's a current thread here in which he's offering SN2s using a hand-selected batch of V2Ts.