How Does Aluminum Flashlight Production Out?

by Jojo Zhang
Posted: Jun 12, 2019

An aluminum Led flashlight is an essential lighting tool for everyday lighting, camping and emergency. It is also one of the necessities product lines of supermarkets, wholesalers, auto brand sellers and hand tools importers or distributor. Recently, more Amazon sellers add LED flashlight to their shops as a kind of product.

As a buyer, if you’ve found a suitable product, you’ll have the initiative and get a reliable price when negotiating with supplier. With 9 years working experience as a salesman in the flashlight factory, I was exposed to a variety of buyers.The key factor of being strong in a negotiation is to pretend to be familiar with the product.

If you want to become an expert on flashlights much faster, you must learn much about the general production process and the composition of core costs and technologies.

Now let’s talk about the composition of core costs and technologies, that is, PCB, LED chip and structure.

The core technologies of aluminum LED flashlight is PCB, LED chip and the structure. Of course, they are also the main determinant of costs.

PCB?Generally, we could distinguish the quality of a PCB through 3 ways.

Thickness. Different PCB materials have different qualities and costs. The thicker PCB is the better high-temperature resistance is. And it is more resistant to deformation.
Gloss and Color. PCB must be covered with printing ink, playing a role of insulation. Without enough gloss or printing ink, the quality of the PCB must be decreased.
Welding appearance. There are lots of components in PCBA. So if the welding is unstable, the components will easily fall off, which would seriously influence the quality.
High-quality PCB need to meet the following requirements:
The component easy assembly and could fix well.• The circuit’s width, thickness and spacing should meet the requirements to avoid the circuit heating, breaking and short circuit;• Copper foil does not come off easily at high temperature.

The copper foil surface is not likely to oxidize. In case the copper breaks down soon after being oxidized.

No additional electromagnetic radiation.

a circuit board, as well as the design deformation error, should be within the allowable range.High temperature, high humidity or other special conditions should also be considered.

There are usually three types of LED chip used on the aluminum LED flashlight: common LED?Cree led and OSRAM LED.

Common LED: The price depends on number of LEDs, sometimes it is also affected by the color temperature band.

Cree LED: The price varies as the luminance of chip series changes.

OSRAM LED: It has higher price compared to the above. Manufactures will not use it unless clients ask.

Third, The Cree LED;(Most popular using high power led flashlight) ;Cree LED have many series; Different series with different feature.Please find below the date from CREE Official.The Cree XPE chip theoretical value max could reach 122Lumens/W.The CREE T6 chip theoretical value max could reach 170Lumens/W. But in actual production according to the different battery power the CREE LED mini is 80Lumens/W.

The structure of LED Flashlight?analyzing from three parts-- weight, components and complexity of the surface pattern.Weight. It is easy to understand. Heavier flashlights use more materials with a higher price.Component. If a flashlight has much more components, it means more production processes. So the labor cost and material wastage will increase.

surface pattern. The labor cost and material wastage will increase due to the complex surface. So the price will increase.

High-power LED flashlight also has a non-negligible accessory. That is the reflector. Commonly there are 2 types of reflector: glazed surface and orange peel metal surface.

For glazed surface reflector, the light is concentrated well and can create a better spot through the reflector. It is suitable for remote area lightings, such as hunting and adventure.

Orange peel metal reflector has good floodlight effect. Through diffuse reflection, it provides wide and clear irradiation, which can be used for close range lighting.

Also, the reflector’s materials can be metal or plastic. Metal reflectors usually have better heat dispersion, which is very important for high-power flashlights. But the disadvantage is that they are much more expensive than plastic reflectors. Therefore, some manufacturers may use plastic reflectors to reduce cost.

After finishing the core technology and cost analysis, now let’s look at the production process with the help of pictures.

Purchase of raw materials:

Including Aluminum, LED chip, switch, O ring, Lens, spring and other parts.

AluminumAdvantages: high strength, good heat dissipation, withstanding high temperature without deformation, making complex structure through CNC manufacturing.LED Chip: All LED chips need to be tested and screened during the procurement process. The same batch of LED chips must be in the same range of color temperature.

Switch: mouse tail switch, button switch and tact switch.

Mouse tail switch is normally used for bright pistol flashlight.

Button switch is the most common one. The quality of switch directly affect the lifetime of the flashlight.

Tact Switch is mostly used on high-power LED flashlights to look advanced. But it sometimes comes unstuck.

O-ring, an essential parts of a flashlight, is usually made of silica gel. A well-sized O-ring can greatly improve the flashlight waterproof level.Lens: They are made of glass or resin. Glass lens has better light transmittance, therefore it is heavier. Resin lens is lighter but less permeable than glass lenses.Springs and other accessories can be chosen according to different sizes. Almost no difference.

LED Flashlight shell production.The design of a flashlight shell must consider the overall structure and function. If a flashlight has good heat dissipation and waterproof performance, every measurement of a component should be accurate to 0.01mm during the CNC process in order to get a compact flashlight.Get rid of metal burr.• After the CNC process, flashlight aluminum shell will leave metal burr. Since the metal burr is quite tough and easy to hurt people, it’s necessary to get rid of metal burr before next step.Oxidation color.All aluminum products must be dyed from oxidation. The oxidation color has 2 different types. Hard Oxidation & Common Oxidation. Hard oxidation is thicker and more rigid. For example, the thickness range of common oxidation is 8-12um, however, hard oxidation is 40-70um thick. And the rigidity range of common oxidation is HV250-350, while it is HV350-550 for the hard oxidation. Also, hard oxidation comes with better insulation, wear resistance as well as corrosion resistance than common oxidation. Therefore, hard oxidation costs more.Since different parts of a flashlight are of different shapes and thicknesses. Each part of the oxidation color process is separate. To ensure the whole flashlight is in the same color, it needs a technician to figure out a proper oxidation time on the basis of its shape and thickness. The color of the aluminum flashlight can be customized according to Pantone No.Assembling.Briefly, it is all about welding LED and components in PCB. Specifically, we need to put the PCBA, reflector, spring, switch, O-ring and shell together to get a complete flashlight. The most important thing here is that all components must be in correct positions without rosin joint. Function Testing.Each flashlight is subject to quality testing 3 times. This is the first step during the inspection of flashlight’s function in order to verify LED chip light and switch sensitivity.

LOGO Printing. When coming to this step, the flashlight must in good condition. Generally, aluminum flashlight logo printing uses silk-screen printing or laser printing. • Silk-screen printing provides 4 different colors. But it does have a little bit of paint loss from daily use. • Laser printing gives a single color(can only be the natural color) but keeps long. And it is easy to use.• Beside two ways mentions above, we can also choose thermal transfer printing or Hydro-transfer printing to get complicated patterns, such as camouflage, carton image and so on.

Final Testing.• Testing is manually operated, focusing on LED flashlight’s function and appearance, LOGO printing. To avoid human error, we will arrange another batch of people to conduct a finishing inspection before packaging. Meanwhile, we will pay attention to the packing materials as clients ask.Package. You can choose a display box, a color box, a double blister package, a slide package, a sandwich package or a gift box as a package of a LED flashlight. Some clients may add some accessories to package, such as Battery and instructions.

Pre-delivery inspection.• As before 2 testings are 100%, the pre-delivery inspection is spot check. We conduct the check strictly according to AQL1.5-2.5 standard. Sampling inspection is needed. And we do follow the AQLI.5-2 5 standard.

If you are sourcing led flashlight, led work light, led headlamp need to customized COLOR, LOGO PACKAGE, please contact with me feel free.