Dropped in a SSC U binned star last night. Nice beam but only marginally brighter. Tried 2xrcr123's and woohoo! Well, until 30 seconds continuous on followed by permanent off!
How are you guys opening that metal pill with the electronics in it? Is there a board or driver I can replace to get this thing running again?
There will just be a resistor in there - it or the LED may have burned out. Probably the LED as they don't like 8 volts up 'em. Oh no they don't.
You'll need a fairish sized resistor to drop the current - see posts 410 on in this thread and especially
https://www.candlepowerforums.com/posts/1418835&postcount=414
Basically read P.14 of this thread to see how I and others have done it.
It isn't hard. You'll need to make up a resistor - I used 6 quarter watt ones in parallel and this has been rock solid reliable. Say you want to drive an SSC at 1 amp, say the voltage under load of 2 RCR cells drops to about 6 volts so from volts = current x resistance :- 6V = 1A x 6 Ohms.
Six quarter watt resistors is about the maximum you'll fit in the pill so you need resistors to make that up. The formula for paralleled resistors is 1/R = 1/R1+1/R2 and so on... So for 6 resistors of 47 ohms we get 6/47 = 1/R or 47/6 ohms = a bit more than we want as that's just shy of 8 ohms. If you can fit a seventh one in (I couldn't) you'll get close enough to 6 ohms.
These values are assumptions, not measured - try 2xRCR123 cells on the resistor and LED and measure the current to be on the safe side - but first check that the LED still works...
HTH
Donald