Vicious LED headlamp

I recently bought a new set of lights for night riding and racing from a designer in Australia going under the name Vicious Power. I'm stoked with the lights, but am looking for advice on how to make them better. In particular there are some things about the LED light that I'm curious about.

Here's a shot of the light, mounted on my helmet. Note the snazzy carbon-fiber shell. You can also see the battery connectors:


A shot from the front. You can sorta see the LED in there and the fact that the reflector is completely smooth, no stippling. In the back left, you can barely see the 14.4V 2.2Ah lithium battery pack:


Another shot of the light head, with a view of the (slightly cheesy) mount:



There are three things I'm hoping folks can help me with:

1. It seems I need to remove that scalloped locking ring on the front to get into the light. Does anyone recognize that part, and know where I can get the proper tool to remove it?

2. You can't see it in this photo, but the battery cable on the lamp is really long. I'd like to cut it down to a pigtail and use the rest of the cable as extension for those times when I want to carry the battery in my pack. I'm no expert on Digikey, so I was hoping somebody could point me toward the correct connector to match the current ones.

3. The LED unit is really bright on full power, and compares favorably to my 10W incandescent bike light. However, the LED has big donut with a small hotspot, where the incan produces a smooth flood beam. If I want to change that, are we talking a reflector change, or do I need to look into optics as well?

Thanks in advance. If someone can help me get this light head open, I'll post pictures of the control circuit inside as well.

k1

[Sid] Vicious LED Headlamp eh? Interesting. . .

It looks to me like a spanner wrech would take the ring off. I don't know where you would find one. Make sure that the ring and the bezer are indeed two seperate pieces.

Be aware that not all headlamps are designed to come apart. The Petzl Myo headlamps for instance are held together with plastic parts that were melted together (the Myo XP is an exception to this as I hear it uses screws). If this headlamp uses a Frean 30mm optic and holder, you will have to cut some plastic to get it out and it will not go back together without glue.

While I think the CF front and metal plug LOOK cool, they seem to be a just a little bit self defeating. Why would you spend the bucks to make a CF part that weighs a half ounce less, then add a huge, heavy metal connector on the back? If it were me I would find a plastic connector or wire the battery in hard.

Hrmm... never seen one of these so I can only speak in generalities...

Typically, smooth reflectors will give you the best throw, but not the smoothest beam. There are exceptions to this rule, but it is still the rule. If the emitter and the power source both stay the same, the more heavily textured the reflector is, the less it will throw, the smoother the beam will be and the larger but more diffused the hotspot will be.

Typically Lux V LEDs are more prone to the donut hole than Lux III lights but it's still a function of how far into the reflector the LED sits and the design of the reflector.

If you are reasonably handy, there's a thing you can do called 'sputtering' the reflector which involves applying clear acrylic spray paint to the reflector. This generally works VERY well and is very easy to do. But... since this is assumably a somewhat high end product, I'd personally want to have a second reflector in hand before doing the mod as it's not reversible at all. But it's so easy to do and the results are generally so pleasing, this seems the obvious route to go.

Next step up would be a different reflector. Since we don't know anything about the size or design of what's in there, we can't really give you any good advice about what might work better. Typically, IMS and McGizmo reflectors work well but there are different diameters of reflectors and different depths of reflectors so you'll obviously need something that will fit. Sometimes you can sand down a reflector to make it fit (or even focus better) or you can add spacers or O-rings to ensure a tight fit. McGizmo has the actual dimensions of all his reflectors and you can find them under the McGizmo forum.

Once you can readily remove the reflector and take a pic of it and maybe measure the diameter of it at the bezel end, that might get us going in the right direction to help you.