CMG Infinity Dimming mod

well hardly a "mod" actually ...
i decided to stop the battery rattling in my infinity when turned off, so i cut a foam ring from an old mousepad to go between head and battery, leaving a hole for the battery contact, this works quite well


a nice side effect i observed was that i could now dim the light by the degree of tightening the head to turn it on, i have noticed this before, but it was always a useless, unpredictable, flickering affair
but now, with the last 45° turn, i can dim the light very smoothly and it doesn't even flicker when i shake or drop it
beamshots (at 1m) at lowest and highest setting: /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif


this is obviously an effect of higher resistance/"bad" contact between battery and head, and i have no idea about the effects on running time (heat loss, etc)
but it's nice for stealth operations and night vision retention, the lowest setting i managed is still enough for reading, very local navigation, stealing your sister's sweets, etc

do you think this could be incorporated into other designs with a thin resistor-pad, that lowers resistance when sqeezed (like some pressure sensors do)?
does anyone know of such a material with specs useful for flashlights?

From the pic you posted, the dimming does not come from adding the foam, but from the black dot placed on the + contact on the base of the circuit (it's designed to do that). Adding the foam allowed you to switch b/w low and high more consistently.

The two stage switch you mention is now made my McGizmo, and similar concepts are used in the FireFly and by some Arc LS mods.

yeah, it has to be that strange contact material, if only i knew what it is (maybe the same stuff they use under the keys in keyboards, cell phones, etc?)
they only used it in the original infinitys though, the ultras came with a metal contact

but a mere 2 stage switch is not what i want, you can do this with a normal resistor, i am looking for a stageless drop-in dimmer

there is a thread about that black contact material some where.

yeah, I had it on my favorites for a little while but now I can't find it again. It gave the name and link to potential sources. Was in a C-based compound of some sort? I can't remember the fulld details.