I think im overdriving my KL1...???

Well as some of you might know, i busted my KL1 after having it for about 2 mins. I unscrewed the the bezel in half and severed the wires from the board to the LS. Anyway I was trying to solder it back and the only leads i could find with voltage on the board are putting out about 5.5 volts. Well i soldered the wires back there and the KL1 seems REALLY bright...??? I havent seen the KL1 at night since i busted it before i could try, but is that how many volts the LS should be run at?? The light seems to get fairly hot after about 1 min or so of continuous usage. Im kinda concfused since i think that if i was feeding it too much power it would be fried already. Any comments?? Maybe this is how the KL1 is originally?

Lumiled's site has all the documentation you should need...

http://www.lumileds.com/luxeon/products/emitter.html
http://www.lumileds.com/luxeon/products/star.htm

- G!mpy

This is pretty neat...just thought I'd mention it

http://www.luxeonstar.com/resistor-calculator.html

Well i toasted my LS with a fresh set of batteries... Pushed button, LS flashed, and it's now dead... i guess ill HAVE to do the 5w mod now...

My "guess" would be that when you soldered the connections to repair the original damage, that somehow the converter was by-passed. I draw this conclusion from your first post where you state that the LS was getting 5.5 volts, and made the assumption that you are using an E2 type (2 cell) body.

That's the current regulation at work. With no load, the switcher will keep pumping the voltage up (to infinity and beyond /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif) to get the proper current to flow. The KL1 has a zener there that keeps the switcher from self destructing in case of a no-load condition. With the LED soldered back in, if you measure the voltage across the leads, you should get the proper voltage of ~3.2V, depending on the Vf rank of course.