$1.88 Ozark Trail 3 aaa single LED 80 lumens

I found this light tonight at my local Walmart. $1.88 for 80 lumens, figured I couldn’t go wrong for an extra beater light (can’t have enough of those eh?). Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew anything more about them. I can’t find any info online. Here are some pics I took really quickly with my phone, I can take better ones and or beam shots with my camera if there’s interest.



at least it isn’t one of those awful 9-LED ones….

the weakest part of these super cheap lights is if they use steel for springs and battery contacts, instead of copper or gold plating.

if it has that, i would pass.

its cut above the harbor freight freebie.
not long enough for 18650.

i modded a 3-AAA light once that was not long enough for 18650

what i did was remove the innards of the switch, the 18650 touched the back metal, and it became a twisty switch

the switches are very long in those things, if you can remove it there will be room for 18650 and just twist the tail cap for a switch!!

wle

I really truly hate those 3×AAA lights. No circuitry to speak of, just crowbar the LED right across the cells, rely on the internal resistance of the AAAs to limit current. Incidentally, crowbar the little 1W LED across an 18650, and it’ll probably go incandescent, then go pouf.

So they start out impressively bright with brandy new cells (with low internal resistance), but almost instantly that internal resistance rises and the current gets lower and thus the light gets lower, too. And lower, and lower, and lower, until you get so sick of crappy light output that you swap the used cells with new and toss out cells with probably 50% or more juice still left in ’em.

This critter looks nice enough (nice pix, btw), but the LED doesn’t look centered at all within the reflector, so I have no idea what the final beam will look like.

If you don’t mind a little modding, you can use an 18350 or maybe even an 18500, figure out how much space you have left, then with stiff material (styrene foam, wood, whatever) make a cylinder about 18mm in diameter and that “extra” bit in length, drill a small hole through it and feed an appropriate-valued resistor through it, just bend over the leads into a spiral or something, one to make contact with the positive of the cell, and another to make contact with the “LED board” or whatever makes contact with the AAA holder now. Should be at least as consistent as a cheap driver with parallelled chip-resistors like you’d find in a similarly-cheap light.

Try 1Ω, work down from there. Should get better light output and more consistent brightness, but with a rechargeable cell.

this light has a resistor.
iirc 1 ohm.
18500 and rolled up cardboard is the easiest.

There ya go…