My "Precious" Has Arrived

Fenix is getting all the "buzz" with their recent releases, but I wanted a Phoenix instead. I had one of CPF's premier Modders perform his magic on a recently acquired Arc-AA "dead-head". My dead-head Arc-AA "Rose From The Ashes" What I requested and received was a 2-stage, with a 1.5W high setting and a custom 90mA low setting. The reflector was parabolic cut (as much as possible given the limitations of the available tooling), and of course polished. What a beauty! The "Low" setting is very similar to the output of a River Rock 2AAA in intensity (with a much nicer color of course). The high is more than you would ever expect to see coming from an Arc-AA. The "High" setting is probably more light than you'll need, since the low is so functional. It's at least equal to a Fenix L1P, but the hot-spot is broader and flows more smoothly into the remaining beam, and is broader than an L1P by around 20%. That's more ouput that I'd hoped for given the HUGE advantage that the L1P has in reflector size, shape, and material. I find it more pleasing to use, as sometimes the beams with too much hot-spot can be annoying to use. The light makes a great hand-warmer too - leave it on for 20 minutes or so and you'll be moving it back and forth like a hot potato - unless you enjoy holding 140F! Sucking darned near 2 amps from a AA cell WILL generate some heat. It appears the heat-sinking is working very well. Words can't describe what a joy this light is to hold, use, play with, and just take out and fondle!
MY PRECIOUS!!!!

Very nice randyo! I like to see some beamshots!

Very nice. Is the name of the modder a secret ?

A secret? No. No reason for secrecy. Right now there's not too many people advertising 2-stage mods on ARC lights, so it should be easy to figure out the provider of this fine piece of workmanship. It's another fine MillerMods project.

The AA uses the same size circuit board as the AAA, so I asked him to do an AA mod for me since I was so impressed with the AAA. It involved more work in a few respects than the AAA lights, so I'm not sure if he's ready to do more AA lights at this time, given all that he's working on.

Right now I'm limited to using Lithium batteries. The positive buttons on NIMH batteries are slightly bigger, and because of the small size of the circuit board, it prevents proper actuation of the high-low function. Lithium batteries (Energizer & Powerstation) buttons are a wee bit smaller and work well.

I'll do beamshots sometime in the next few days - too busy right now.

randyo said:

Right now I'm limited to using Lithium batteries. The positive buttons on NIMH batteries are slightly bigger, and because of the small size of the circuit board, it prevents proper actuation of the high-low function. Lithium batteries (Energizer & Powerstation) buttons are a wee bit smaller and work well.

I'll do beamshots sometime in the next few days - too busy right now.

Click to expand...

In future mods of the ARC AA that I do, I'll have a fix for the issue you're having with the button size being too big on some batteries.

Man that is awesome. Great mod. Can't wait for the beamshots.

Ditto on the beamshots.
Let see that mod fire up