What on EARTH?!

One of my orders from DX came today...this light in fact..

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4201

the first time i turned it on, it worked okay, then i turned it off and set it down to play with my new 30mw laser green laser..
when i picked up the light again, it didnt work, didnt turn on. I took out the battery, and replaced it, as i was screwing it in, the switch was on, and it went bright, then as i screwed further, it went dim again. It is now at the point that when i press the two parts together so that its just touching, the light is bright, normal. When i screw it in even a tiny bit, its goes dim, or goes off completely. AND, the battery heats up to the point its actually too hot to pick up....i have cleaned the threads, and done everything i could possibly think of, even look at the clicky.



the light only works when barely touching, something like this



This is the usual output...


this is the diminished out put that i assume heats up the battery,



the pill inside the head



the body, and you can see the spring thats connected to the cliky



the cliky



I am utterly clueless as to what on earth is going on...it doesnt make sense
...HELP!!!

Incidently it uses CR2 batteries.

on the plus side my SMJLEd came today, solitare being used to to light up this picture....




Crenshaw

Sounds like you have a short somewhere, that's directing all the current and heat up the battery.

You might unscrew the pill by sticking needle nose tweezers in those two holes and see if a blob of solder is contacting the housing. Oh, and be afraid of those batteries exploding if they are shorting out.

What you're describing is what would happen if the positive terminal of the battery was touching the outside of the light, giving it a direct path to the negative terminal of the battery.

I would look closer at the inside of the body. That blurry picture of the head, that looks like it's showing with the battery in it.

Try taking a picture without the battery and put your camera on Macro mode (Macro mode is for closeup pictures, like you're taking)... typically looks like a flower, you press the button with the flower next to it, and the flower shows up on the screen of the camera, then take your pictures.

Looking at the picture of that battery, it looks like it has a metal ring around the positive terminal... If you have any around, I would try a different brand of battery. (One with a plastic ring around the positive terminal.)

That's not a batt in the tube, thats the end of the led housing or "pill".

aparently the problem IS with the PCB, i tried pushing it down onto a UFC3, if you just touched the contacts, it lighted up, if you press is, it will fail...getting the soldering iron out now....

You might want to toss the batts that got hot. I would not use them again once they've been used beyond their design/compromised.

If there's a short, obviously that's a concern. When I was younger, I would take two 9V batteries and hook them end to end and leave them in a field. I'd come back the next day and see fragments of the battery label scattered around. I never figured out how long it took them to explode, but it must have been something.

Okay, so me and my dad have been trying to figure this thing out for the past hour.... i took the whole thing apart, and resoldered it, it worked for abit, then everything just went to pieces.i couldnt get the clicky back properly, when i did, it all worked for awhile, then started shorting when i screwed the pill back in, then stoped working entirely becuase i think i broke the wires soldered to the LED. And now i need to get solder blotters to get out the huge gunk of solder which i suspect is NOW shorting everything... Its sad because i really liked this before it failed on me. I will probably get another one from DX. The present one will become a project to try and figure out what happened.

Oh well, at least i have my laser pointer...thanks for the help, will post here if anything becomes updated, or is working again, etc

Crenshaw

Typical DX light