SureFire M6 batteries exploded

Had my SF M6 in the truck (December in Missouri....COLD!!)
w/ SF batteries in it..got my light out to use it and it wouldnt turn on. opened it to put in new batteries and they had blown up in the melting my carrier ......sent the light back to SF..thay have had it since Jan 27 and they still have not fixed it....so much for the 2 week turn around!!!!
They told me they have never had this happen I have talked to several ppl and this is happening ALOT!
Any thoughts?

got pictures?

Were all the batteries in the same state of charge? Mixing batts by brand or freshness can cause blowups. So can using "off" brands. Not sure I've ever heard of a SureFire light with SureFire batts having a failure like that, with batts all of the same freshness.

Maybe the cold caused some of the batts to act like they were dead?

How cold is "cold?"

Scott

All the batteries were SF batteries....all new on istallation.....oh not hellifyed cold...um 20-35 degrees

rkboyer911 said:

All the batteries were SF batteries....all new on istallation.....oh not hellifyed cold...um 20-35 degrees

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Ouch! The cold should not have been a factor. CR123's spec is -40C for both storage and operation.

One of SF cells must have shorted on its own and started a chain reaction. Hope they replace your light soon. I don't expect they will even comment on the problem.

Sound kind of scary!

Never mind the M6 (which can be replaced) - glad that "you" are OK.

Will

got pictures???

this is your third post. I've never heard of a failure like this. yet you claim you hear it happens a lot???

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rkboyer911 said:

Had my SF M6 in the truck (December in Missouri....COLD!!)
w/ SF batteries in it..got my light out to use it and it wouldnt turn on. opened it to put in new batteries and they had blown up in the melting my carrier ......sent the light back to SF..thay have had it since Jan 27 and they still have not fixed it....so much for the 2 week turn around!!!!
They told me they have never had this happen I have talked to several ppl and this is happening ALOT!
Any thoughts?

Click to expand...

rkboyer911 said:

. . .I have talked to several ppl and this is happening ALOT!

Click to expand...

First time to hear/read about this. . .One-off[ers] I'm sure. It can take longer than (2) two weeks for you to get it back. My SureFire 10X took around six (6) weeks or so. Must suck not having the SF.M6 around though. . .

Enjoy!

The M6 pulls on the cells pretty hard - IMHO, almost at the design limit. Still, that is not something I have heard from other M6 users on this forum. I would have expected that to be discussed quite a bit here if it were "common". That is a pretty popular high end light.

rkboyer911 - Do you have any pics you could share with us?

sorry didnt take any pics of it before I sent it off.....I say ive heard of this alot..due to my friend was one of the guys that was involved in the R&D of the nite ops Gladius......he also use to work for surefire.....He said this was a problem for several lots of batteries......unknown problem......but yes im ok and so it me brand new Duramax!! LOL

rkboyer911 said:

sorry didnt take any pics of it before I sent it off.....I say ive heard of this alot..due to my friend was one of the guys that was involved in the R&D of the nite ops Gladius......he also use to work for surefire.....He said this was a problem for several lots of batteries......unknown problem......but yes im ok and so it me brand new Duramax!! LOL

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Sorry if your claim that this happens a lot just doesnot pan out. there's a huge user base of Surefire M6 users on cpf and this failure mode has NEVER been mentioned before your second of third post.

sure would be nice if you could offer some pics or other proof this has actually happened.

My read is that he is not making a claim that the M6 does this happens a lot. The claim is that a friend or friends said it happens a lot. Those are two different things. You can't expect a guy to prove the veracity of what a friend has said.

I would be curious to know how many SureFire M6s have been sold versus how many are owned by CPF users. I don't know, but suspect that M6 use by CPFers would be less severe, say, than by someone in the military. Another aspect is, of all the battery time that M6s have seen in use, how much of that is by CPF users?

What I am saying is that just because it hasn't come under the gaze of CPF readers, that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Nor does it mean that it isn't probable. We tend not to be hard users.

Personally I am not worried about a burst in an M6. There is 1) a lot of room inside for gas to expand in, and 2) a huge lens area for built-up pressure to push on before the body would burst. I would expect the lens to push out/fail before the cap blew off. I could be wrong, but that's the way it seems to me. In this case the light didn't burst.

Scott

I've got an M6 with SF123As sitting in my car for the past year, through 12F weather most recently. It hasn't been a problem so far. Maybe I should go and check sometime.

rkboyer911 said:

Had my SF M6 in the truck (December in Missouri....COLD!!)
w/ SF batteries in it..got my light out to use it and it wouldnt turn on. opened it to put in new batteries and they had blown up in the melting my carrier ......sent the light back to SF..thay have had it since Jan 27 and they still have not fixed it....so much for the 2 week turn around!!!!
They told me they have never had this happen I have talked to several ppl and this is happening ALOT!
Any thoughts?

Click to expand...

There was thread on a Pelican M6 that did this too.

Well, maybe that's a Pelican for you. . .Interesting photo.

Not saying this is a M6 problem at all...I just found it funny that it all melted down......Im not saying anybody is at fault.

I don't think anybody's doubting that it hapenned to your light, rkboyer911. What we're trying to decipher is your reference to this hapenning "a lot" in the SF M6 - I don't recall a single report of this on CPF. Usually when something goes bad with a light (regardless of brand) we here about it again an again (case in hand, the recent issues with the SF U2 switch).

I say ive heard of this alot..due to my friend was one of the guys that was involved in the R&D of the nite ops Gladius......he also use to work for surefire.....He said this was a problem for several lots of batteries......unknown problem.....

Click to expand...

Is your friend actually talking about this hapenning in the M6, or talking about the batteries (independent of light being used in)? I'm trying to understand what you're referring to. Exploding batteries is not an unknown problem (as NewBie pointed out), but I wouldn't say it happens "a lot" (which is different than saying "several lots" of deffective batteries).

In McGizmo style:

if it just did that w/o operation that is very shocking.. i'm actually surprised it *doesn't* happen in operation.

When we did the M6 v M66 showdown.. the M6 just stopped operating at 11 minutes into the run.. apparently an internal overheat problem.. after about 1-2 minutes of sitting there i decided to measure the battery temp and it was STILL 180F..

When i did some math and figured out that the M6 generates about 22W of heat internal on the batteries.. and that when we build LED lights we are concerned about dumping 5 to 10W, in much bigger hosts, that really amazed me!

Another thing.. 'explode' is not even implicit.. it's explicitly saying that parts went flying at large percentages of the speed of sound.. did it explode or just catch fire and melt things? there is a very important difference.

-awr

Well I guess it didnt explode...it did get hot enough to melt the carrier and the batteries were in pieces inside the light.IE the covers on the batteries were off and the bad smell of acid was about. It also got hot enough to damage the bulb end. But I guess I should have taken pictures of this to show im not a moron and this did happen to me...Ill know now if this ever happens again!! HOPE THE HELL NOT!! Nothing left the inside(shrapnel). No my buddy didnt say it was just in the M6 lights. He said they had several(thats the words he used) batteries come back to SF that had melted together/shorted out inside different lights. Now several to me is more than 2. So it might have been only 3 different times this happened I dont know.