Pumaman said:
any hints on how to approach it and what emitter/star to upgrade with as well? (stock is pretty purple) Goldserve will also solder the emitter to the flupic for a fee? not really informed or competent about changing out the guts, any help appreciated.
thanks
There are 2 boards, the emitter board, and the converter board.
Changing the emitter will require you to unsolder the positive and negative tabs of the emitter from the emitter board and then you'll have to work the emitter free from the board itself. I didn't need to swap out the emitters on either of mine so I can't tell you if the emitter is stuck down with thermal epoxy or just regular heatsink compound.
Once the original emitter is removed you can install the new emitter by putting a very thin layer of thermal epoxy on the bottom of the new emitter and then place the new emitter back onto the emitter board. Make sure the emitter is perfectly centered and that the positive and negative tabs of the emitter line up with the proper solder pads on the top of the emitter board. Use steady light pressure to ensure a good epoxy bond between the 2 parts.
After the epoxy has set you can solder the new emitter's tabs down onto the solder pads of the board.
Installing a FLuPIC board isn't very hard but you must work slowly and carefully. How are your soldering skills?
You will need a pair of fine tipped straight needle-nosed pliers, a pencil style soldering iron of around 30 watts or so, some desolder wick or a desoldering bulb/pump, a bit of thin gauge insulated hook-up wire, and some kind of clamping mechanism to hold the tiny FLuPIC board in place while you solder 2 short wires onto it. Do not attempt this with a soldering "gun".
For the clamp I use a small mostly plastic hobby vise but anything will work, even a pair of vise-grip style locking pliers will work if your careful.
I've done this twice, the first time went smoothly but the second time had one minor hiccup.
The first thing you have to do is to remove the lightengine from the bezel. You do this by putting the tips of the needle-nosed pliers into the small slots of the brass ring and turning counter clockwise while holding the bezel firmly in your other hand. There will be some resistance but it should spin right out. It may help to push on the front lens slightly while turning the brass ring with the pliers.
Take a very close look at the pictures of the light engine posted in this thread and the LR-5 thread
here.
Take note that the brass ring is not threaded, just the black nylon spacer ring is, and that the brass ring is only press-fit into the black ring.
During the removal of the light engine of the second flashlight, I was able to back the whole engine out about 3 full turns and then it stopped advancing outward. Spinning the brass ring was only twisting the wires between the emitter board and the converter.
Aha! The press-fit of the brass ring to the nylon spacer was slipping.
I had to pull and wiggle the pliers back and forth in order to get the brass ring and converter board to separate from the black spacer. It took about 30 seconds of wiggling to get them apart and then I had to cut the wires going to the emitter board. No big deal. Those wires are going to be replaced any way.
I then had to place the plier tips up against the inside wall of the black ring and by expanding the tips outward I was able to get enough "grab" on the ring to spin it out of the bezel. I found that pushing on the front lens again seemed to help with the grip of the plier tips on the black ring while trying to spin the ring out of the bezel.
There's only a slim chance of this happening to you but I thought I'd describe it to you so that you would know what to do to get around it.
Now you can remove the original converter board from the ring by placing the brass ring/board in the clamp and removing the solder from the 2 spots. Take your time with this step. The two pieces will come apart with only minor fussing.
Next is to gently sand or file down the edge of the new FLuPIC converter a tiny bit so it fits into the ring in place of the old converter board. Once it fits you can go ahead and tack solder the FLuPIC to the ring just like the old board was. Pretty straight forward stuff.
Now you will need to install a pair of inch and a half long wires to the positive and negative LED spots of the FLuPIC.
Remove the emitter board from the black nylon spacer ring and press the brass ring/FLuPIC back into place.
Unsolder one (and only one) of the old wires from the emitter board and resolder the corresponding new wire from the FLuPIC in place. Be very careful not to melt the insulation of the new wire while soldering it to the pad on the emitter board. You don't want any accidental short circuits to the metal of the emitter board later on. Now that the first wire is done you can go ahead and remove the second old wire from the emitter board and solder the remaining new wire in place. By removing only one wire from the emitter board at a time you make sure you will NOT get the polarity of the wire connections mixed up by mistake.
Coil the wire up a bit and slip the emitter board back onto the black nylon spacer ring. You've just built a new smarter full featured light engine or "pill" as it's sometimes called.
Put the mineral glass lens/reflector back into the bezel and slowly and gently screw the light engine back in place.
You will find that if you stop and push the lens/reflector towards the light engine every few turns you can tell how much further you need to spin the engine in order to get it back to it's proper position.
Go easy on the last few turns, it may be hard to tell if the black ring is all the way in the bezel and if the brass ring is just spinning against the nylon ring.
Well that's it. You can find pictures of where the positive and negative wires on the FLuPIC go in the beginning of Goldserve's FLuPIC sales thread.
Hope this all makes sense.
