Surefire KL6 - Greatest Reflector ever?

So, yesterday afternoon i finally received my Gorgeous SureFire L6 Lumamax from F250XLT on CPFMP.

after a brief inspection (which might have also been called a drooling session) I whipped three brand new Panasonic CR123A's from my box'o'batts and fired this baby up.

What i was met with was a combination of disappointment and elation. you see, the KL6 head which the L6 Lumamax is equipped with has an extremely antiquated Luxeon V emitter, four Luxeon-I emitters in a single package. The resulting LED was capable, at the time, of some quite heroic feats of illumination but compared to todays LED wizardry, looks like something that barely escaped the stone age.

as a result, the light-output from this (rather expensive) torch was not especially impressive, and the tint was not spectacular either.

When your EDC is a Cree XP-G 90-CRI driven at 1.4A for more than 220 lumens of output, 100 lumens of slightly green light isn't very exciting. This did not surprise me, in fact, i was expecting this to be the case.

However, what I did see brought pure elation to my heart; the beam-pattern. the wide and extremely deep reflector results in a beam pattern that has the capability to be a mighty throw monster.

Allow me to explain. As has become common knowledge, LED throw is directly linked to the size of the emissive surface, the "size of the thing that the light comes from", the bigger it is, the more floody a beam you'll get.

Now, the Luxeon-V LED has a HUGE emissive surface due to the four dies, in fact, the emissive surface is larger than that of a Cree XM-L from a side-by-side comparison.

And yet, this torch produces a hotspot dramatically smaller than that of my tightest-throwing torch, a TIR-equipped XR-E throwmonster.

I had initially intended to mod this head with an XM-L, but i'm now leaning towards putting an XP-G in there for Über-throw and longer runtimes. frankly, 800 lumens of throw isn't really that much more use than 450 lumens of super-throw.

::BEAMSHOTS::

All photos were at ISO200, F/3.5 and 1/125s, so brightnesses are relative and comparable. AWB was on so tints are not. Camera was on a tripod, lights were affixed to top of camera in the same place every time.

This is my Romisen RC-F4, in person it's my throwiest light, edging out the TIR-throwmonster by just a smidge.


This is the TIR throwmonster:


This is an XR-E R2 P60 dropin from Dealextreme:


This is the L6 Lumamax:


This is an XM-L Floodmonster with Scotch-Tape on the lens:


As you can see, while dimmer the L6 clearly has a far smaller hotspot than the XR-E lights. i'm very exited by the prospects of modding this light... i just wish it had better heatsinking.

Possible Heatsinking idea;

replace the plastic electronics-container below the LED plate with an Aluminium truncated cone that interfaces directly with the inverted conical section at the top of the body. house driver directly on truncated end of cone.

Does anyone think that my heatsink plan sounds good?

Sent From my Desire-Z, please excuse brevity.

:::update:::

:thumbsdow:fail:
I'm a complete moron *hits head with spanner*
The inside of the lens on my KL6 had some residue on it, which i attempted to clean out.
I initially tried to wipe it off with Q-tips and lab-grade 99.9% Isopropanol (no residue) from the emitter-hole from the bottom, which worked reasonably well over the course of three or four attempts.

Afterwards, there was a sizeable amount of fluff inside the head from the q-tips (new one each time) which i attempted to clean out with some compressed gas...
This was a mistake, as the gas COATED the inside of the head with residue of some sort, i think it might be lubricant or something along those lines.

To attempt to remedy this, I managed to unscrew the bezel-ring and gained access to the lens and inside of the head from the front, and this is where i made my biggest mistake; Instead of getting some cotton wool, i used the mother****ing damn stupid Q-tips to attempt to clean off the residue, which, as we all should know, left many scratches in the vapor-deposited finish.

Only after i realised how much i'd screwed up did i fetch the cotton-wool and attempt to rectify the mistake, but by then it was too late and the damage was done.

I cleaned off the lens and reassembled the head after ministering to the reflector as best i could, and looking directly down into the reflector with the light on (through a 99.999% reflectivity mirror) i can't see any of the scratches, but they show up pretty noticeably from the sides with the light on

:thumbsdow:fail:

Anyone know of any Aluminium-vapour deposition services in the UK, preferably near London?

Been there done that and I learnt the hard way I will never wipe a reflector ever again with anything, sorry to hear this happen to you.

Currently in talks with an optics-coating company who specialise in vacuum-recoating mirror-telescope reflectors for 99% reflectivity, hopefully it won't be prohibitively expensive


*cries*

Wow Cypher...I was initially going to say congrats on the light...i have a mint L6 in stock for and love it! But, damn dude, you f'ed that reflector up....I fel your pain...hope you can get it repaired at a decent price?

:thumbsdow:fail: I'm utterly ashamed at what i've done to this poor noble L6. it's such a vintage light, the KL6s Serial number is A00113

The LED mounting plate/heatsink doesn't even have the LED retaining nubs that most KL6s had