An Oldie: Pelican M6 LED modding

[louie]

AKA the 2390, 3W Lux3. Seems like this light has lingered without any mods. Boy, we were sure excited when Battery Station instigated this light, now it's just way outgunned (41l?) and no answers to mods, except a few dropins.

It's such a nice package, I figured I'd start investigating. Here is the light:


Here's the pill:


It turns out the reflector is just glued on. I just pried with a gasket scraper:



The first shoulder has some sort of soft, silver lined heat pad gasket. I scraped it off with an Xacto, but could not get it off cleanly:





What's left is an odd hollow brass platform that the Lux3 is glued to. The leads are bent flush and a paper insulator is attached, as the reflector surrounds the LED body. I'm still trying to decide how best to remove the LED. It appears the brass platform only supports the LED around most of the circumference, leaving the middle with just some glue. This doesn't seem very good from a heatsinking standpoint. Glue seems to cover the electrical leads. I'm afraid brute removal might damage other components under the glue. It also looks to me like the only way to get the driver out is to remove the rivet holding the battery spring.

At very least, I think I'll try just sticking an SSC P4 on there, since I have some. I also need more Arctic epoxy, I think.



If I can cut the leads at the LED body and remove it without damaging the pill, I'm confident I can glue a P4 on there and attach to the existing leads, even if I can't access the circuit. Any thoughts?

 

[GarageBoy]

Sounds feasible. I forgot, but do the old McGizmo Ecans for the old 1 Watter work with this?

 

[vtunderground]

Cool, I had no idea the Pelican reflector came off so easily.

If I had any spare Seoul's laying around, I'd be soldering one into my 2390 right now.

 

[louie]

Update. Mod completed. No competition to the new, fancy lights, but a nice improvement.

I cut the leads off flush to the LED, leaving something going down into the pill to solder to. The mount showed the concave cup design for a Lux3.

I filed the mount flat for my SSC P4 plus Arctic Alumina

SSC P4 glued on with Arctic Alumina epoxy. Not shown, I cut most of the LED leads off and bent them flush and overlapped the existing leads, then soldered. The LED tabs were trimmed flush.

Also not shown, I had to remove a small metal collar in the reflector opening to fit the new LED. I just stuck a Bic pen into the hole and pried the collar out. I used super glue to reattach the reflector. I'm sure Arctic Alumina would also work.

Result - works great! There is a small dark spot in the center of the beam when closer than a meter or so. Over that distance, the dark spot is gone. My guess is it runs about 1A of current and looks like about 120 lumens, something I find quite usable.

 

[louie]

Sorry, duplicate post

 

[louie]

sorry, duplicate post

 

[louie]

Followup - for the record, the current version of this light specs a Cree emitter and 177 lumens. The old version had a Luxeon 3W and 61l or so, depending on what you read. I don't know when Pelican took the original spec from Battery Station and gave it the model 2390, but evidently they upgraded the emitter and left the model number the same.

 

[yowzer]

Good timing. One of my projects for tomorrow is switching out a Luxeon star in a Pelican M3 with a high-CRI SSC P4 star. Have the light disassembled, now just have to figure out how to dislodge the current star from the heat sink... it appears to be epoxied in.

 

[louie]

Can't really help - I don't know the M3.

 

[yowzer]

Can't really help - I don't know the M3.

It was a LOT easier than yours was. Was able to use a small screwdriver to pop the star off the heat sink plug.