Don't you just hate it when a mod goes bad right at the last minute?

Hey guys, just wanted to vent. I spent about 6 straight hours on a mod and even went out to go buy some supplies and everything was going perfect until the very last moment. When I was putting it back together, I tried turning it on but apparently the current draw on the switch was too high and it blew out. Now I have a completely non functioning flashlight that was working fine before. :laughing: oh well. Thing took forever because the flashlight internal components and wires were all made precisely and putting it back together and soldering and everything was the biggest pain ever. It a flashlight with a built in rechargeable battery (3 X AAA ni-mh 900mah energizer), with the rear tail cap that removes to expose a cigarette outlet for the car to recharge with a Lux I as an emitter. It was a very nice light in my opinion which cost 40 bucks. It was regulated with a AMC7135 and the charging circuit does pulse charging as I measured and can detect when fully charged. I tried swapping it with a Luxeon K2 and direct driving it hoping I could get about 100 lumens from it. Well that's my story. Any others?

Bought a beamshaper lens for my HDS and it got stuck in the end of the light. Couldn't get it out no matter how I tried. Had to break it with a punch and hammer. Pulled it out with a pick and somehow it didn't ruin the reflector. Very simple mod that went astray, oh well!

freezer-popped my old T1. put a seoul in and re-assembled. the o-ring didnt fit right anymore. freezer-popped that baby again. took out the o ring and reassembled. now the optic rattled in the head. freezer-popped my darlin yet another time. tried some rtv compound to seat the optic. got it all over the optic. tried some unknown solvent to clean it.... bye bye optic.

I know the feeling, thats why I no longer mod lights,

I modded about a dozen lights (Mags and Vintage lights) using one of the DX converter boards (3V 700mAh) and was very happy with the results (tested on walks 10-30 minutes). I then decided to do a tailstand endurance test and found out the boards will fail at about 1 hour of continuous use on 2 brand new D cells unless they are heatsinked.... Time to rebuild a dozen lights

One thing I found handy (for reworking mods...) is a thermal glue over at DX that can be removed without superhuman efforts unlike AA expoxy.

Been there, done that - I feel for you, man. Worst is when everything works perfectly, you pot the whole thing in epoxy, and the damn thing dies after the epoxy is cured... :hairpull:

Trying to build a 3xCree Mag mod.

Snipped the corners of the crees, wired/soldered everything together, verified connectivity, glued everything down to heatsink, then proceeded to break a soldered connection.

No big deal, right? Aargh! That #$#!@ heatsink sucks up all the heat from the solder gun and I cannot get the wire reattached. So, I overheat the emitter, get pissed-off after 20 failed attempts to resolder, and end up banging the solder gun tip to the cree dome. Aargh!

I then say, whatever, and try prying the emitter off of the heatsink, so I can resolder the connection. In the process, I break another connection.

That's it, I'm not messing around w/ these #%@#$ emitters anymore. My lack of soldering skills, lack of patience, and lack of steadiness dictate sticking w/ stars in the future.

baker

I attempted to convert a 2 x 18650 Leef body to fit a M*glite D head. This involved sawing off the threads from a D size M*g body and gluing it on top of the Leef threads (SF M fitting). Unfortunately I didn't have the patience to file down the threads on the Leef body enough and tried hammering the parts together. Needless to say I destroyed the Leef body in the process, crushing the tail end.

With hindsight, it all seems so obvious that; hammer + aluminium body = mangled mess. Oh well, I'll know better next time. It's a real shame though since the Leef body looked awesome with my Fivemega M*g D head.

I want to add by mentioning that I was working on a project for a friend and things went wrong and it was due to my clumsiness. I was cutting heatsink material from a copper plate with 18 pre-epoxied K2's. I did not think that I needed to cut it before I epoxied them. Oops. Oh well, I found a way to protect the LEDs from the copper bits anyway. I tackled it one weekend and I cut two corners cut using a Dremel (this is 3/16" copper -HA!), and decided to call it a night way too early in the morning. I was so shakey and jittery because it was so late/early, that I almost rushed to clean up my desk. Well, in the process, I was pulling on the cord of my soldering iron to put it away when it snagged my big, heavy headlight cluster and it fell a foot and a half from the computer tower (out of the way where I thought it was safe) face first onto the hard floor.
I think that I screamed a little ... ...Then it sank in ...

Ahhhhh!!! I rushed over and noticed that only one K2 was damaged due to the slight angle of impact (the dome was squarshed). Those K2's are one tough mother! I decided to de-solder that LED and power up the rest (I had 6 parrallel banks of 3 series K2s, so 5 remaining banks should light up well). Well, only one bank lit up.

Apparently the slugs of atleast one LED per bank shorted out against the heatsink. This caused 4 LEDs to get destroyed when powered up because the protective diodes shorted out or fused open. Bond wires could have fused, too. I have 5 dead K2's and a non-working light. Who knows how many other slugs are shorted to the ground, causing slight damage to the ESD diodes.

Needless to say, I could not repair things right away and I went to bed angry at myself. I put that project aside and ordered 6 replacement K2s. Unfortunately, it was put on the far back burner since classes resumed and I almost did not feel like continuing. I hope I get it finished since this was for a friend (its been going really slow ). I might have to re-design the thing for him free of charge and use fewer high-efficiency LEDs like the Cree or Rebel... The whole even still haunts me. Sigh...

-Tony

Just opened my LOD-CE for a Cree P4 to Q5 mod and made a few very nasty scratches on the "as good as new" coating.
next I found that everything inside was also glued together.After I was finished with taking the old Cree out it looked like a warzone.
Man I am MAD!