First post, I hope this is in a good spot.
Some years back I had a Fenix P1D-CE. For those of you who don't know, it's a 123a light where the emitter assembly screws into the body. So to swap out a battery, you have to unscrew the top, swap batteries, then screw it back together. This put a noticeable amount of wear on the threading over the thousands of hours (yes, thousands) that I used it for. Toward the end, the spring-loaded head would simply pop off, as the threading was too stripped to hold it on.
After some tinkering, I got the idea of using some tape I had lying around to give the threads something to bite into. The tape was 5 mils thick with 3 mils of Teflon film and 2 mils of silicone adhesive. (If you want some, go to www.mcmaster.com and get Item # 6305A22 – the 5 yard stuff is incredibly cohesive, while the18 yard stuff easily separates into film and adhesive. Also note that this is absolutely nothing like PTFE / Teflon pipe-seal tape.) I wound a single layer over the male threading (ends overlapping to avoid gaps) and cleanly cut the ends off with a razor blade to form a continuous monolayer. After that fix, I never once had problems with threading over the next few hundred hours I used the light.
I hope that helps someone wishing to resurrect a flashlight with a stripped screw-joint!
Some years back I had a Fenix P1D-CE. For those of you who don't know, it's a 123a light where the emitter assembly screws into the body. So to swap out a battery, you have to unscrew the top, swap batteries, then screw it back together. This put a noticeable amount of wear on the threading over the thousands of hours (yes, thousands) that I used it for. Toward the end, the spring-loaded head would simply pop off, as the threading was too stripped to hold it on.
After some tinkering, I got the idea of using some tape I had lying around to give the threads something to bite into. The tape was 5 mils thick with 3 mils of Teflon film and 2 mils of silicone adhesive. (If you want some, go to www.mcmaster.com and get Item # 6305A22 – the 5 yard stuff is incredibly cohesive, while the18 yard stuff easily separates into film and adhesive. Also note that this is absolutely nothing like PTFE / Teflon pipe-seal tape.) I wound a single layer over the male threading (ends overlapping to avoid gaps) and cleanly cut the ends off with a razor blade to form a continuous monolayer. After that fix, I never once had problems with threading over the next few hundred hours I used the light.
I hope that helps someone wishing to resurrect a flashlight with a stripped screw-joint!
