Adjustable focus won't focus properly

Hi all, how do you set the focus of an adjustable focus (push/pull zoom) LED torch when it won't quite go far enough forward to get a sharp focus? I can get it to focus properly by taking the lens out and holding it in front a bit further out. Are there any washers you can take out, or maybe screw the pill in a bit further if it will? Torch is an EDI-T P15, pretty happy with it but it would be better if I could focus it properly. The flood is fine, but when I zoom down to a tight spot it's a little bit out of focus, it needs to go further. I did a search and couldn't find anything. Cheers.

I don't have that exact light, but I have similar lights and am quite familiar with the construction of budget zoomable lights and have modded them myself:

1. The sliding bezel has an end-cap that holds the lens in at the very front of the bezel. Unscrew this end cap. The best way to do this is to grip the main part of the sliding bezel in your right hand. In the palm of your left hand hold one of those rubber pads from the grocery store used to open stuck jars. Press the flashlight into the pad while turning. Remove the end cap and the lens (with the end cap off the lens should fall out. If it doesn't just hold it upside down and tap the back of the light till it falls out).

2. With the lens out the pill (the part of the light holding the LED and driver) should be visible. There will either be 2 holes or 2 slots on either side of it. Insert something into those holes (needle nosed pliers or snap-ring pliers, or even a large paperclip should work) and turn to unscrew the pill. Remove the pill. Make sure you take out the battery first before trying this.

3. The pill flares out at the front. This is what stops the bezel from falling off the light when you extend it into spot mode.

4. Take a hand file and file down the back of this flared portion of the bezel to make it thinner. This will damage or remove the threads at the very top of the pill, but this shouldn't be an issue as long as most of the threads are intact. The goal is to file down the "hard stop" at the back of the pill so that the bezel can slide forward further to get to optimum distance from the LED.

5. Alternatively, you may be able to adjust the lens so it sits further forward. Perhaps by inserting an extra o-ring behind the lens. This may mean the lens holder doesn't screw down all the way, but has the advantage that it could be far easier to mod and could be reversible if it doesn't work.

Thanks Fireclaw18, I did what you said. I filed down the back stop of the pill as far as I could, right down to the O-ring, but I didn't have much metal to work with- I could only take off about 1mm. Tried it and it was an improvement but still needed more. So as I didn't have another lens O-ring I made a washer out of thin cardboard and put that behind the lens. Also switched the position of the lens O-ring from in front of the lens to behind it. That's all I can get, any more spacers and the bezel won't catch the thread to screw in. Tried it and it was better again, but still not quite perfect. At least like this I can now see the lines of the LED when shining it against a wall, although the lines are still a bit fuzzy. Before I couldn't see any lines at all. I hope the cardboard spacer doesn't catch on fire with the heat. The other issue is I'm not sure if it has to have an O-ring between the bezel and the lens. The only other thing I could do would be to remove some metal from the stop inside the head, but I don't have the tools to do this. I think I'd need a dremel tool, might have to get one. I can't see why they made it like this, you'd think they'd have a bit of adjustment built in so that you can focus it properly. Even the $25 cheapies from the supermarket focus better than this, and this is meant to be a pretty good light. As it was I picked up fox eyeshine from 300m a few nights ago, not too bad and reflective road signs were showing up from around 600m. Should be even better now. Thanks again.

Relax, there is no way your cardboard will catch fire.
LED and driver would be fried at a much lower temperature than required to ignite paper.

It is a bit odd that your light didn't focus properly in its stock configuration. I own an EDI-T T11 and it focuses very well. It's one of the throwiest stock lights I own and easily out-throws my Sipik 68s.

Double-check to make sure that the star (the small disk the LED sits on) is flat on the pill. In most lights like this the star simply sits loose on top of the pill. It may have some thermal grease underneath, or it may have a washer on top to hold it down. If the star has somehow lifted away from the pill, that could put the LED out of position and account for why the light isn't focusing properly.

Another thing you could try is upgrading the emitter and driver. Assuming your P15 uses an older emitter like an XRE, switching to a newer emitter that doesn't have the glass dome and sits flatter on the star may help slightly. Swapping in an XP-G2 might reduce throw slightly, but might be in better focus. It might also significantly improve flood mode, especially if you put in a higher output driver.

Don't worry too much about trying to make small zoomies like this waterproof. My favorite EDC is a heavily modded 1xAA sized Sipik 58 zoomie. I purposely left out one of the o-rings on the light so it is not waterproof at all. But there's a good reason for this: If I install all possible o-rings and the light becomes air-tight then the zoom-mechanism doesn't work properly. Vacuum pressure will cause the bezel return to whatever position it was in when the light was sealed, as the air pressure within and without the light tries to equalize. The light needs to allow air to enter and exit so the pressure can equalize.

If you need a truly waterproof submersible light, get a fixed focus light instead of a zoomie.

I couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it. I think this P15 has an XML emitter? My P4 headhunter was also out of focus, so I filed the pill down on that one too and it fixed the focus up perfectly without needing to put spacers under the lens. I don't really need them to be waterproof. Tried them both out in the dark last night and they are pretty good now, definitely improved them a lot. Thanks.

Glad its working much better for you now. There are lots of other mods you can do with zoomables to make them more effective.

The closer the LED sits to the back of the lens in flood mode, the wider your flood will be. Many budget zoomables give very poor flood because of this. But with some spacers and a little filing this can often be fixed making the light much more usable up close without affecting spot performance in any way.

Another mod I like doing is adding a small plastic reflector (such as from a cheap maglite) around the emitter. It doesn't need to be focused, the goal is to just redirect some of the light bouncing around in the head out the front. In practice, I've found that this greatly improves flood mode: instead of a uniform flood, the light now has a very wide hotspot in the middle of the flood that's probably twice as bright as with no reflector. This also gets rid of all the ugly rings those lights often have in flood mode.

In spot mode, the reflector adds an ugly corona image of the reflector around the image of the die. This is ugly, but in practice doesn't affect throw or real world performance.