First led mod and first homemade flashlight

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

What i'll show you here are old things from the time when led flashlights where not something one could buy at the supermarket along with their weekly beer or toilet paper supply.

Most of the led FL that could be found here were expensive and somewhat bulky because of the 3x 1.5V batteries but the blueish low light output looked cool (no pun intented !) because it was new and the led was supposed to last forever (who remember those fragile bulbs today ?)

My first led mod was based on a crapy full plastic 2xAA and was build to be installed in place of the bulb. I used two of the "best" leds i could find (of course better leds did exist but they were not that easy to get for me) glued together to fit in the reflector.

The driver is a mini (sot23-6) adjustable boost converter with the feedback pin connected to a serial resistor for driving the two parallel led in current mode.

The patch is part of the original mod because the switch didn't work without a little help from this friend but the broken plastic bulb holder happened just a minute before i took the picture (crapy plastic doesn't age well)

I am not that proud of my soldering skills ...

But it still works !

Well ... The base was really cheap and the light output was barely decent (maybe in the 3-5lm range) for general use but it was homemade and pretty unique !

2

Thanks for sharing that history” Kame Sennin “. We need to see the Evolution of Flashlight Modders and the available tools that were used back in time. I wonder If there is a Thread for this already somewhere ? :beer:

3

The blue one was a fun try but it was neither bright nor reliable enough to be really useful so i decided to start a new project :

  • More light output !
  • Sturdy design with a full metal body
  • A Real switch (No more patch !)
  • Able to run from one or two AA
  • Use what i had at hand (no nice bright led, no tail switch, no reflector, ...)

And here is what i ended with :

Everything including the isolated battery connection was crafted during spare time with the folks from my workplace's machine shop

The driver was based on the same boost converter than my previous attempt upgraded to four leds

The leds themslves were still the same low power type

The switch is a standard pcb lever switch with the lever length reduced so it barely protrudes from the head

Despite it's low output i have used this oneas edc for some time ... until i could eventually get something with better led ! ;-)

4

:+1:

5

Good start to modding Kame Sennin! Thanks for sharing.

6

:sunglasses:

I guess you should take a look at the The 6th Annual BLF / Old Lumens Scratch Made Light Contest thread :wink:

7

Work with what you have! :+1:

8

Wow! That’s crazy cool! :sunglasses: :+1: