What's for dinner? Baked UltraFire!!

Got bored and decided to toss my UltraFire LZZ-F15 in the oven.

After stumbling on some pics of baked flashlights, I decided I wanted to give it a go on one of my 'lesser liked' torches. I decided to use my LZZ-F15. It really is a decent light, but its kinda too big for an EDC, so it mainly sits on the shelf. I have actually never used this light, apart from the day I got it. Anyway, I gutted the torch, and turned on the broiler on my oven (500F). I carefully placed the pieces on a baking sheet, and just let it do its thing for roughly 45 mins.

Here are some pictures..

Before:



And the results:




Kool! Now this thing is a looker, but we still have an issue! It's not that bright, and it has a crappy 5 mode, next mode mem driver. Hmm, how about direct drive!
I bypassed the driver, and beefed up all the contact points on the springs. I also lapped the bottom of the aluminum star, and smoothed out the base in the pill for better contact, and added a tiny bit of AS5 (did't get a pic of this, sorry.) It now measures 3.4 amps at the tail cap on a Efest IMR 18650, and ~3 amps on a 4Sevens 26650. Woo Hoo!! Better than the ~2 amps with the stock driver. Also, I removed the original led insulation gasket, because it covered the led up quite a bit, and was blocking a lot of sideways light. I used a normal style instead, and this improved the output quite a bit, but gave it somewhat of a dirty beam. I plan on swapping the emitter soon anyway. Probably to a XML2, something in the 4-4500k range. Too bad 26350's don't exist, or I'd put a MT-G2 in this baby, one can dream though...

Pics:




Didnt get any before shots, but here are some beam photo's:

Wall is roughly 5ft away


Barn is roughly 55-60ft away (zoomed photo)


Cheers :buddies:

thats pretty darn cool. i like ultrafires i cant get a basic one for like 8 bucks with a xml

That's gorgeous now. Very cool, and your other mods seem to have enhanced it as well. Thanks for sharing your adventure with us.

WOAH! Can somebody who knows something about anodizing explain what is happening here? Does that affect the surface properties or does it literally just change the color? I am so doing that to my Fenix L1T v.2 to the main body part if it doesn't affect anything else.

I thought this might have been a torture test, I'm not disappointed! That's a really nice mod, is the anodising weaker now?

I understand that it considerably weakens the anodizing, but I don't mind worn off finishes - looks kinda well-loved. I'll be giving it a go on something or other soon.

Great results. I have baked a few lights too and like how they turned out. I don't notice anything bad happening to the anodizing. I think the temperature is just affecting the dye. It doesn't seem to work as well with hard anodizing, so a Fenix may not change colors. The heat can soften the aluminum, so make sure the light has cooled down all the way before you put the light back together.

Yeah, not too sure about the long term effects of this guys. I guess we'll find out.

I took my UF to work and showed it off to everyone (they are big into flashlights as well, cavers lol) and they all LOVED it. Cant believe how good it looks. My buddy is going to do this to his Magicshine headlamp clones, and see what happens. I will report the results of durability after our next caving trip.

So.... somebody braver than me try this pronto on a fenix type 3 hard anodizing. I want to do it to the middle part of my L1T v.2, but not if it's going to make it scratch off really easily or just not work well.

The funny thing is strangely with the old L1t body it already is a slighty brown/black anodizing. It looks black at first glance but in the light it definitely is more brown than the head or tail which I guess are different when they made it the version 2.0

I liked your recipe so I decided to bake my own Ultrafire

The tailcap, mid-section and bezel started to change colours before the head, and at first I thought the head needed a bit longer in the oven to assume the same colour because of its larger mass. It got an additional 25-30 minutes but nothing happened, so now I believe that part came from a different batch/manufacturer/block of aluminium/anodizing process.

Sorry about the decapitation in the before-pic.