Last Friday I ordered my first programmable flashlight, the Akoray K-106. This light has a lot of fans at Candlepower Forums and it was the first direct-shipped budget Chinese light I thought about getting back in November when I was thinking about getting some lithium ion batteries. You may recall that the first LED flashlight I got was a Fenix L2D, which could be converted to a L1D that takes 1 AA battery. That light has six modes but is not as bright as the L2D with its 2 AA batteries. However, if you up the ante further by inserting a single 3.6V lithium ion battery, you lose all of the lower modes and the light is stuck on High. For this reason, I wound up buying the budget Uniquefire S10, but I blew it out when I tried a lithium-ion battery. So I was still looking for a 1 AA light that could handle a lithium ion battery properly.
Category: Flashlights
Ultrafire MCU WF-1200L
My first impression is that it is smaller than I thought, but also heavier. This is a serious hunk of metal! One nice thing about getting it second hand from a CPF member is the guy I bought it from treated it very well. There aren’t any marks on it that I could see. Plus he made sure to lubricate the o-rings and actually modified the tail switch so that you can halfway press it and the light comes on momentarily (all of my other lights have reverse clickies that you have to click all the way on and then let go before the light comes on; this light has a forward clicky). One of the reasons I got this light is that it had very good heat sinking and comes completely apart. The LED is mounted to a large brass pill that screws into the throat of the flashlight (threaded portion is 29mm diameter and the part that holds the driver is 23mm). The brass carries the heat from the LED directly into the body of the flashlight near its heaviest part. People talk about the light getting fairly hot after using it for a while, and that is a good thing. What would be much worse is the body staying cool while the LED cooks itself. Still, I left the light on for about 15 minutes and it only got warm. It would be pretty neat to be able to buy an extra pill and add my own 21mm driver and LED (maybe a warm P7 or a SST-50), almost like having a drop-in.
Flashlight Suspension
I have been learning a lot about flashlights for the last year and most of it has come from reading the discussion forums at Candlepower Forums. I’ve learned enough that I have written a couple of reviews of lights and I answer questions from newbies every now and then (I’ve also done a lot of editing of their Wiki, which was terrible). By and large the people are very helpful and incredibly knowledgeable. There is just a lot to know. And there are thousands of threads for a newbie to search through, even using Google search. It helps that the forums are strictly moderated, so flaming, bad language, etc. are simply not to be found. They have a lot of rules and zero tolerance of people who break them.
Long story short, I got suspended from the flashlight discussion board. Not long, just for a day. Here’s how it happened.
The Old P60 Drop-In
More research on flashlights, so you can skip this . . .
The main high-end US flashlight company, Surefire, sells innards of a flashlight called a P60. It consists of three parts: a reflector, a bulb, and the electronics that drive it. Surefire uses this assembly in several different models of flashlights. It has become a standard part and now many off-brands offer P60 drop-ins that can be used in Surefire lights. And because there are so many P60 drop-ins and Surefires are so expensive, now people make P60-compatible bodies that will accept the drop-ins. So instead of spending $150 on Surefire’s system, you can spend $18 for a generic.
Bad Flashlight Decision
In just the last few months, new LED’s were introduced for flashlights by the company Cree. Cree assigns bin numbers to LED’s that indicate how bright they are. All of my newest lights have various Cree LED’s and bin numbers. The Fenix is XR-E LED with a Q5 bin. The tiny flashlight is a XP-E LED (smaller than the XR-E) with a Q5 bin. There isn’t a Q6. For whatever reason, the next level of brightness is R2. The stainless flashlight I just got has an XP-E R2 LED, but I couldn’t tell that it was brighter than the Q5’s. Now there is a new LED called the XP-G which has bin numbers as high as R5. That should be significantly brighter. So I went looking around for cheap R5 flashlights, but couldn’t find any. For whatever dumb reason, I wound up buying an R2 LED that promised to be 250 lumens (my brightest is 180 lumens), not thinking that that probably wasn’t even possible with a R2. Worse, I bought a 6-mode flashlight with 3 different flashy modes (fast strobe, slow strobe, and SOS) and I didn’t realize that the light wouldn’t accept lithium-ion batteries which are the only way to get significant brightness out of a 1xAA light. So it showed up yesterday and it was a kind of decent light. I posted a review with all the details. Anyway, I didn’t like the light and the only way I was going to like it was if I could make it brighter by using a lithium-ion battery, so even though you aren’t supposed to use one, I put one in there anyway. And the light wouldn’t work anymore. I had burned it up. I didn’t even have it a whole day.
But as it turned out, the “driver” which is all the electronics in between the battery and the LED that give it the modes and provide a uniform voltage had burned out. The LED itself was still working. And the switch was still working. These LED’s need 3.6 volts to light up. So a 1xAA flashlight has to boost the voltage up to that level. But a lithium-ion battery is already 3.6 volts. Most lights that use a lithium-ion battery still regulate the voltage so that the brightness doesn’t fade as the battery voltage fades, but you can also “direct drive” a LED. So I found the wires leading from the LED and soldered them onto some plates that were connected to the positive and negative ends of the battery. It didn’t work, but I think that was because of my lousy soldering. I fiddled with the soldering and I would get just a flash of light every now and then. So I fiddled with it some more and now it works! So I have a 1-mode direct drive light. It won’t work at all with an AA battery, but it is quite bright with the lithium-ion battery (maybe my brightest light). So that’s better than nothing.