5 watt on Arc modded board?

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Robocop

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I was unable to find much on this with a search and I hope this is the correct forum for this question.....I have a chance to get a 5 watt emitter from a co-worker at a great deal. I really dont know what I would do with it now but I thought about playing around with it and one of my Arc boards. This may be an obvious question but I never have really used any 5 watters before so can anyone tell me what it would do if I attatched this to an Arc board. I have one that I am planning to add a resistor to bump the current to about 700mAh. Would this be worth the effort or is this 5 watter not going to amount to much when ran from this circuit?...I know the 5 watters do not do well with NX-05 optics and are more flood than anything but it would be kind of cool to have a 5 watt Arc. The reason I was thinking this was my friend Owen had a TW4 long ago. This thing was incredible when ran off of one cell and I regret not ever buying one...could this idea of mine even come close to that old TW4?...anyone ever seen or done this?...once again thanks for any imput on this.
 
let me give my grain of salt

i believe the arc chip can only put out 5.5V max, so with 5W has Vf in excess of 6.7V, you won't get lot of juice to flow to the lux. Sure, it will run, just not bright and maybe even as bright (or less bright) as the lux 1W before it.
If you DO want a 5W arc, depending on your arc board (only for arc LS rev 1, 2 piece head), you can ask roth (or some other machiner) to make you custom arc sink. then you can put BB and run 5W on your arc. boosting the current won't do you much good, again, Vout limitation of the chip.

hope this helps
 
Thanks shiftd....kind of thought there may be some problems here or everyone would have been doing this before now. I like the idea of a different heat sink and board...this would allow me to reverse the 5 watt back to stock specs. if I wanted to do so. Maybe sometime in the future there will be a ready available sink and board to fit.I have 4 total ARC Ls series with one that I will never open up as it is a perfect LitFuse modded TWOH. All of them are the newer style with the one piece bezel and all are functionally perfect. I sometimes wonder why I simply can not leave well enough alone..hehe I just can not forget how impressive that TW4 was for lighting up an entire room from one cell. Always did want a 5 watt on a single cell but for now I guess I will have to wait or try to find an older TW4 somehow....Thanks again
 
one more food for thought.

Arc head is not tall enough and not wide enough to allow for a better reflector for 5W, should you go that way. this results in you can only use NX05 (a BIG X shape beam with donut hole in the middle) or the SO17XA (a pronounced donut hole).
if you only want to lighting up room nicely, get your modded arc LS at 700 mA and use the McFlood instead of the current optic or reflector that you may have. it won't get as hot as 5W, but serves the purpose equally well /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif


I did a 5W mod before using roth's custom sink and BB750 board in arc LS rev1 head, and within a minute, the head got very warm. I don't think the BB running in regulation anyway, but that is beside the point. The light from the 5W (it is a U3U lux 5W + NX05)is not cool at all. Well, it was cool at first, but the more you look at it, the more you dislike it.


well, if you cannot wait to find TW4, get KL4 + E1 body, and you get the same thing /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif (more expensive though /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif)
 
my ls3 head is almost the same size as a ls head
(tiny bit longer I think)

but the 5 watt led is powered to 2.5 watts
 
ARC LS3 heads have indentical demensions to LSH heads
 
It's a bad idea to put a 5W LED on an Arc LS Board and hope to run it off 1x123.

I've done a couple of Arc mods as special requests and boosted the current to 750mA and used a 5W LED in place of the standard ones. The light is a bomb.

It turns on fine, works, gets hot as expected. A friend left it on top of a book shelf and it accidentally turned itself back on (battery shifted, since then I've used foam pads to keep the battery from reactivating the light). It was left on for about 5 minutes.

The reflector had melted onto the lens and become sputtered (originally smooth IMS 17mm reflector), the O-Ring became stuck in place. The dome of the LED peeled off the phosphor layer (LED becomes damaged at 290 Farenheit, so it was far past that). The light was pressurized from the inside and an audible pop was hear from the escaping gas. The battery ejected some white goo, and was making loud noises, especially considering batteries aren't supposed to make any noise. It was thrown away quickly, since I'd heard of the damage from exploding lithiums already.

Anyway, the point is, unless you're running on 2xCR2s or 2xCR123s (which the end user of the rebuilt light mentioned above is), you probably don't want to try it. There are a few folks here with a lathe that may be willing to lend you a hand and cut down a 2xAA pack to 2xCR2 or CR123 though.

Good luck.
 
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