UK upgrades of greenforce tristar and tektite ls4

Hi and thanks for looking at this post

Has anyone recently tried to upgrade the leds in these two torches and is prepared to share drawings and sources or give me a price to upgrade mine.

I've bought both used recently and was a little disappointed having previously had a magicshine mj810e - significantly cheaper but from the naked eye possibly more light.

the tristar seems to be the later design minus the rubber head, could go down the hepstar route but would prefer to use the money to dive.

please bear in mind though trained as an engineer i don't have a lathe....but do have a soldering iron.


Can you indicate the possible improvements in lumens i am likely to achieve.

thanks

barchetta99

Hi,

I also have a greenforce tristar waiting for an upgrade. I haven't disassembled it yet but I disassembled another tristar, which was probably one of the first they ever made (the head was modified by greenforce after anodizing, just with a resistor, no driver at all, and some pretty sloppy soldering). The new heads seem to have a driver as they indicate the battery status, but other than that, the driver also goes out of regulation when the battery is almost empty.

There are sevaral multi-emitter boards with optics available, but these tend to have a quite floody beam because the optic is too small. They can be found at led-tech.de, cutter.com.au etc. I suspect greenforce uses similar boards and optics nowadays.
I'm looking into using individual 3 XPG or XML LEDs with seperate optics (like in the original greenforce tristar).
The greenforce lights that use LEDs that I opened so far all used quite old leds which were only driven at lower currents. The new line of LED heads seem to use mainly XPG leds, but even then the don't push them to the maximum. Using such leds and driving them to 1.5A should already give you a good boost in performance compared to what you have now. The trick will be to find good optics with a nice tight spot which are not to big. Ledil has some promising optics but I haven't taken the time to look into them.
If you find optics with the same dimensions, you may be able to reuse the heatsink of the current head.

I have no experience with the tektite ls4.

Johan

Hi Johan,

Let me know how you get on modding your one as i may ask you to look at mine.

thanks for the post in the meantime.

I'm thinking of using XPG's with Ledil LXP lenses, but I'm not sure if it will fit in the newer head. It should fit in the old head I meantionned though.
Not sure about the driver though. I want to keep it compatible with the greenforce batteries.

edit: 3 LXP lenses won't fit in the newer tristar (21.6mm/lens => 46,54mm outer diameter>45mm of the head)
It will fit in my older tristar, so I guess I'll use that for the old one.
For the new one, I'm looking at a 19mm Fraen reflector that should work but it is made for XR-E. I might overdrive it a little.
For driver I guess the DX 26110 is a good match as it is small, efficient, easy to mod the current and can drive 3 leds, no anoying modes.