As detailed in my ‘hello’ post the other day, I have a Maglite Solitaire that I modified to run an LED using a 12v MN21 battery.
I have had the Sol for many a year and only gets light (no pun intended) use but I wanted an LED upgrade for longer run times and brighter output.
I searched on a famous auction site and found some 3mm white LEDs complete with resistors for use with 12v. They only cost a couple of quid (pounds sterling for those of you that aren’t English) for 5 of each.
Knowing that the MN21 battery was nice and small and ran at 12v, my (tiny) mind got to work.
I already knew that the MN21 batteries are actually a bunch of 1.5v button batteries in a case but wanted to keep this conversion as simple as possible and use ‘of the shelf’ batteries.
Plus with the resistor ‘carrier’ it makes the conversion very easy to go from standard to modified if the MN21 batteries were not available. As we all know, AAA batteries can be bought absolutely everywhere. Not always the case for the MN21.
So, how did I do it?
I’ve never tried soldering before nor do I own a soldering iron so I took the components to a friend’s house and he did the soldering for me.
Also, I don’t have any pictures of the procedure, just the finished article. My camera isn’t that great either so I’ll apologise before you see the pics.
Using the caps from another MN21 battery, the resistor was soldered to the underneath of the + cap. A section of the outer ‘casing’ from a ball point pen was cut to suitable length and then the – cap was hit with a small tack to make a hole for the resistor wire to poke through. That was then cut and carefully soldered in place.
Voila, one resistor holder-cum-battery spacer!
This combined with the MN21 battery takes up the same space as a standard AAA battery.
Now for the bulb.
As you can guess, very easy to do by cutting the LED legs to length and then bending to suit the spacing of the standard bulb.
My LED had a small lip at the base which I removed by carefully sanding it away.
Put them all together and you have:
Should I need to convert back to standard (because I can’t get hold of a MN21) all I have to do is remove the LED bulb and store it in the tail cap after removing the standard bulb from there, pop the spacer in my pocket and put in the standard bulb and AAA battery.
The ability to focus has mysteriously disappeared, and the throw isn’t fantastic, but that doesn’t bother me as it only ever gets used for close up work (map reading in car, finding keyholes in the dark etc.) Candle mode is much improved in my opinion.
So, there you have it. Hope you like it. It’s my very first mod which I did without any research or experience. I just used my ingenuity and crossed my fingers.