Cree XR-E in Ultrafire WF601A, detailed Pics!

Hello guys,

I would like to present my first ever mod.
All one needs is a Ultrafire WF601A from Dae, a BadBoy converter from the Shoppe, and a Cree XR-E LED from Cutter mounted on a star PCB.
A small piece of copper plated circiut board material and a little aluminium ring (both described below) are helpful, too.

Lets get to work:



One can see the wires for the LED and the 2 resistors 0.15 ohm, one soldered on top of the other. This should give 666mA. It is unbelievable, but I dropped one resistor on my messy workshop floor and found it after just half a minute:rock:



I made a disc of copper plated pcb material with the size of the original converter board, which only puts out something around 220mA.

The BadBoy positive pole is connected with a wire to the middle of the pcb disc.



Here you see the BadBoy sitting on the pcb disc.



The pcb disc is now soldered under the heatsink.



Now the interesting part comes:
The Cree is mounted on the Heatsink with some thermal paste. Please note that I insulated the top contacts of the LED with yellow kapton tape.
Then I made an aluminium ring which is 1mm long, inner diameter 7mm; outer diameter 8mm. This ring will center the LED perfectly in the reflector. The kapton tape prevents the ring from shorting the LED contacts.
As the negative contact of the BadBoy is ground, I used some tiffany copper tape to connect the negative contact of the LED to the fastening screw (ground).
The soldering joints look quite messy. This is because I soldered them with a paperclip I heated with a lighter. This is usually not my style, but I lent the key of my rooming house's workshop to a guy who is absent right now
But as I use high quality Fluitin soldering wire, the joints work flawlessly.



This is how the result looks like.




This is a beamshot with a stock WF601A vs. my modded one. The distance is about 1m from the door. The beam of the moddend one is considerably brighter and a little on the yellow side. the stock one is a little blueish. The Cree light is nicer to look at; it reveals more contrast and details. The spillbeam is really huge which makes the light very useful.
The downside is a donut of slightly less intensity around the center, but this is hardly noticable in normal environment.
The current draw is also higher, 670mA stock vs. 1.2A modded

The modded flashlight gets a little warm after some time, but I think this is ok.

Some outdoor beamshots will follow when it gets dark.

Kind regards,

Julez

Very nice mod! Keep up the good work.

Tachy

nice mod with the use of the cree :thumbsup: i wish my modding skills were that good.

Thank you for your kind replys!

As it is raining cats and dogs at the moment, the outdoor beamshots will have to wait...

Bur I made an interesting observation :

I bought this optic for testing reasons.
After I removed it from the holder and drilled the bottom hole a little wider so that is just fits around the metal ring, it makes a rather nice beam from the Cree. The hotspot is a little bigger than the one on my beamshot picture, and the spillbeam fades nicely away. Unfortunately, the optic is too small to fit in the ultrafire well.

But, there is hope. I ordered this optic from cutter. It has the same diameter as the glass lens. So I could both replace the lens and the reflector with it.
I wonder how well it will work...

Cheers,

Julez

Great first mod Julian! I like your homemade fabrication work, good luck with the optic testing too.

:goodjob:

Nice work!

DUDE, you drilled an optic ? lol

Anywayz, great efforts. Keep us posted...

Another one is hooked. Good job.

Keep us posted on the optic test. This led is new territory for most of us.

cheers, ZWF

bombelman said:

DUDE, you drilled an optic ? lol

Click to expand...

Don't panic! The drilling depth was just about 1.5mm. I made sure that the inner surface of the optic, that is actually in touch with the light, was not scratched.:wave:

Cheers,

Julez

Good job Julian :rock:

Will

Hi folks!

I finally got it managed to make the promised beamshots. I catched a rainfree period and desided to go for a walk through the local forest.

The first picture is a tree about 30m away, the second one is the noise protection wall of the local highway about 100m away. Each picture shows stock and mod in change. Shutter time 13s, F4, ISO 50.

Your opinion please:






Highly recommended:

Joby Gorillapod

Cheers,

Julez

Holy S***. Now i have to figure out how to open the head of one of my jetbeam lights....

What bin is the Led from Cutter? (tint and flux)

Very nice.

It is great to see folks getting back into modding again.

Hi!

Yeah, I would say that these Crees really live up to the expectations the uproar about them created.

@ CM: Sorry, as a noob I don't really know much about this color bin thing. It is not written on the LEDs or in the invoice either.

But someone from Cutter said that the flux bin was "P3", which translates to 73.9lm - 80.6lm. The best bin (Q3) is supposed to have 20lm more.

Cheers,

Julez

Did you have to modify the reflector at all? That beamshot shows some rings, but I think me and others wouldn't mind that for the increase in usable light

Nope. Reflector is stock as it comes. Nothing modified in this regard.

Ahha! We were right in thinking the reflector would work well!

Did you try it with the stock driver? You *are* pushing a lot more current to it thank the Seoul LED.. I likely will just use the stock driver as I don't have the $$ for a new convertor. The sidespill is crazy on these crees.

Yeah, I guess I was lucky with the reflector. Perhaps the Seoul LED and the cree have comparable radiation patterns.

Well, the driver is 13$ at the shoppe, not too much when I read what some folks in here are willing to spend for a flashlight.

I did not use the stock driver, as I gave it and the Seoul LED to my brother to build some flameless pois for training :naughty:

Cheers,

Julez

I'll try it with the stock driver sometime and report back. I'm probably going to mount my cree bin P2 on a pentium heatsink, and slap a 2.5" aspherical lens in front of it. Since it will be exposed with wires, I can use that setup for testing reflectors and circuits to it. When I get some more cree's (likely higher flux bins) I'll probably mount one in the ultrafire, and do other mods.

Just waiting for the heatsink. I got my led today...