Being a flashaholic I have my quirks about why I find aesthetically pleasing in a flashlight. I am not a fan of tapered shapes so when I decided to go on to my next mod I chose an old school KL1 head to work with.
Back in the good old days I believe the KL1 head was rated at 22 lumens with a luxeon emitter. Being that it's 2010 I decided to bring some of today's LED technology into that platform. The idea was single cell high watt rocket. I decided to go with a Cree MC-E emitter because of its smaller emitter diameter. The original KL1 heads seemed to have a smaller inner diameter than most of the newer bulbous KL1 series, therefore I needed all the space I could get.
I ordered up a 3 mode driver from the shiningbeam with outputs of 140mA, 1,000mA and 2,500mA. The emitter was wired in parallel resulting in 625mA per die on high.
Next would be the issue of finding an optic and holder for this custom application. While I would love to spin up come part that fits just perfectly I don't have access to a lathe to do so, so I had to be some what creative. I used Carclo optic and holder from LEDsupply. At first I thought it would fit in perfectly however because of the small inside diameter of the light head I had to do some "machining". Once the holder was modified to fit I had to come up with a heat sink/spacer for the LED and optic to fit snugly in the head. I ordered up some copper sheeting thinking I would make something that fit nicely. While waiting for the copper to come I looked around my desk/workshop and decided to use an old laptop copper heat sink. After some semi scientific measurements I sandwiched some pieces to take up the necessary space. It should be noted that this set up is not "rated" for 100% duty use because of the limited heat sink size. Considering that on high there is a good 10 watts of power being consumed and about 7 watt is becoming heat I rate this as intermittent use.
Arctic Alumina thermal adhesive was used to secure the heat sink to the body of the light and the MC-E to the heat sink.
After the top portion of the light was completed I carefully secured the driver in place and went on to testing the beast.
The optic I used was more of a medium focus and is a little more floody than I would like. Lucky for me it's very easy to change lenses.
My hat is off to all the great CPF photographers out there, I have a very difficult time photographing beam shots and having them accurately reproduce what I see.
The beam shots were taken on a semi dark street, the first is a control shot, then my 123 R2 Quark on high and then the KL1MC-E on high.
The test was performed using a freshly charged AW with a tail cap draw of 2.8A . That means it's discharging at about 5C
! Output in lumens > a lot
Enjoy
Back in the good old days I believe the KL1 head was rated at 22 lumens with a luxeon emitter. Being that it's 2010 I decided to bring some of today's LED technology into that platform. The idea was single cell high watt rocket. I decided to go with a Cree MC-E emitter because of its smaller emitter diameter. The original KL1 heads seemed to have a smaller inner diameter than most of the newer bulbous KL1 series, therefore I needed all the space I could get.
I ordered up a 3 mode driver from the shiningbeam with outputs of 140mA, 1,000mA and 2,500mA. The emitter was wired in parallel resulting in 625mA per die on high.
Next would be the issue of finding an optic and holder for this custom application. While I would love to spin up come part that fits just perfectly I don't have access to a lathe to do so, so I had to be some what creative. I used Carclo optic and holder from LEDsupply. At first I thought it would fit in perfectly however because of the small inside diameter of the light head I had to do some "machining". Once the holder was modified to fit I had to come up with a heat sink/spacer for the LED and optic to fit snugly in the head. I ordered up some copper sheeting thinking I would make something that fit nicely. While waiting for the copper to come I looked around my desk/workshop and decided to use an old laptop copper heat sink. After some semi scientific measurements I sandwiched some pieces to take up the necessary space. It should be noted that this set up is not "rated" for 100% duty use because of the limited heat sink size. Considering that on high there is a good 10 watts of power being consumed and about 7 watt is becoming heat I rate this as intermittent use.
Arctic Alumina thermal adhesive was used to secure the heat sink to the body of the light and the MC-E to the heat sink.
After the top portion of the light was completed I carefully secured the driver in place and went on to testing the beast.
The optic I used was more of a medium focus and is a little more floody than I would like. Lucky for me it's very easy to change lenses.
My hat is off to all the great CPF photographers out there, I have a very difficult time photographing beam shots and having them accurately reproduce what I see.
The beam shots were taken on a semi dark street, the first is a control shot, then my 123 R2 Quark on high and then the KL1MC-E on high.
The test was performed using a freshly charged AW with a tail cap draw of 2.8A . That means it's discharging at about 5C
! Output in lumens > a lotEnjoy
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