The flashlight-hobby has become very rewarding in recent times. There is an excellent choice of good and reliable flashlight for sale if you want something good to spend real money on, but if you are on a tight budget, there is tons of cheap stuff out there to buy with a click of your mouse, and despite of the crappy build the output of these flashlights is not neccesarily much worse than anything expensive. And if your budget light fails you are allowed to repair and improve them, hours of fun again 
. And there is this forum to share your fun with others who have the same handicap. So I decided to start doing a mod myself
So here I went, sitting comfortably behind my desktop, I bought a 9 dollar cr123-light on dx (this one brand-less, even not **fire) , ordered a Nichia219,92CRI4500K mounted on a 10mm-board (thanks Illumination Supply), and found in my spare parts box a OP-reflector from an old S10. I removed the XRE-led from the light, and also the smooth (and very plastic) reflector, soldered the Nichia led in (not the best solder-job I have done) and fiddled the aluminium OP-reflector quite neatly in place.
Presto, for less than 20 dollars my extremely pleasant EDC-light, small even for an cr123-light, with an impressive output and beam profile, resonable heat sinking, and my all time favourite color temperature and high CRI led in it. And of course it's nice to use this light while no major manufacturer has a flashlight on the market yet with this lovely led. Time will tell how reliable it is, but for the time being it works excellent, and hey, there's always a spare flashlight nearby
Pictures:
(the beam shot is my mod on 16340 compared to a quark mini on high on 14500, 1 meter from the wall)
[/URL] body by djozz, on Flickr[/IMG]
[/URL] reflector by djozz, on Flickr[/IMG]
[/URL] led by djozz, on Flickr[/IMG]
[/URL] size by djozz, on Flickr[/IMG]
[/URL] beamcomparison by djozz, on Flickr[/IMG]
djozz
. And there is this forum to share your fun with others who have the same handicap. So I decided to start doing a mod myself
So here I went, sitting comfortably behind my desktop, I bought a 9 dollar cr123-light on dx (this one brand-less, even not **fire) , ordered a Nichia219,92CRI4500K mounted on a 10mm-board (thanks Illumination Supply), and found in my spare parts box a OP-reflector from an old S10. I removed the XRE-led from the light, and also the smooth (and very plastic) reflector, soldered the Nichia led in (not the best solder-job I have done) and fiddled the aluminium OP-reflector quite neatly in place.
Presto, for less than 20 dollars my extremely pleasant EDC-light, small even for an cr123-light, with an impressive output and beam profile, resonable heat sinking, and my all time favourite color temperature and high CRI led in it. And of course it's nice to use this light while no major manufacturer has a flashlight on the market yet with this lovely led. Time will tell how reliable it is, but for the time being it works excellent, and hey, there's always a spare flashlight nearby
Pictures:
(the beam shot is my mod on 16340 compared to a quark mini on high on 14500, 1 meter from the wall)
djozz
