Today i modded my SC52 L2-nw. I added mechanical reverse polarity protection! It was easy/fast to source the plastic material and cut out the ring ("donut"), add some double-sided adhesive tape and install it.
Pic is worth a thousands words:
I made the outer ring diameter as wide as an AA/14500 battery, i.e. 14mm:
The thickness of the plastic alone is almost
1.2mm, so not super thin tbh. That's because the SC52 driver disc does have a protruding (+)contact (solder point). So the plastic should be thicker (higher) than that solder point. The white double-sided adhesive tape adds to the height of the spacer for a total of about ~1.45mm (the yellow foil has a thickness of 0.10mm and isn't part of the installation, the white tape is 0.15mm thick, does the maths add up? lol):
Before the installation. Here you can see the central raised "solder point":
After the installation (mod). You can still see the central raised "solder point", of course, but the surrounding plastic is higher:
I've tested it. The spacer works. Perfect mechanical reverse polarity protection! I should have done the mod a long time ago .. tbh i haven't been using this light at all. It's a cherry-picked unit with supernice rose NW tint and just a collection piece. Also the original lack of reverse polarity protection had worried me, a reason why i didn't want to use it more often. Maybe the use of double-sided adhesive tape (carpet tape) was not the very best idea, because in Turbo mode the heat could mess up the adhesive with an unpredictable long-term result. Adhesives also age. Well, fingers crossed!
Today i actually mis-installed a battery on the
Olight Smini Ti and almost ruined the electronics (
so i thought)! It's indeed the reason why i did this Zebralight mod today. lol
:thumbsup:
EDIT: Heck, while we're at it, i also examined the MRPP (mechanical reverse polarity protection) of
Olight S1A stainless steel. Down inside the body tube one can see a plastic(?) spacer, similar to my modded SC52, surrounding the raised solder point contact. According to my difficult measurements, the clearance is about 0.4mm. In practice, that should be sufficient. But given that an Eneloop nub has a height of 1.6mm, the 0.4mm is not plenty imho. So i cut out spacers of varying thicknesses (0.30, 0.35, 0.60) and combined them to learn about the max possible spacer to add:
Here the S1A SS, original, unmodded. Deep down the body tube there is a black donut. It covers/protects the electronic components on the driver disc and should(?) also serve as MRPP, i guess. The untrained eye might think that the donut is a lathed stainless steel wall (similar to SC52 construction) lol but I doht see circular/concentric machining marks, so the donut is prolly just a spacer made out of hard plastic which got dropped down onto the driver:
From my tests i learned that adding a spacer of 1.00mm (2×0.35 + 0.30) was too much but 0.95mm (0.60 +1×0.35) was still okay. I decided to install just 1 spacer of 0.60mm thickness, made out of clear plastic, and this time not employ any adhesives! For my plastic spacer to stay in place, it had to be a press fit (or friction fit). By carefully trimming the diameter with a Stanley knife i managed to cut the spacer diameter to perfect fitment. Once installed, it's very much permanent. So i had to know for sure that adding 0.60mm to the system would work:
And yes, it works. As mentioned, i could even add another 0.30 or 0.35mm paperboard spacer to the system and the light would still work! That goes to show that the original clearance is very little. Through my mod, the S1A SS has now a generous clearance of 1.00mm (instead of 0.4mm), if i reverse-installed the battery.
