Swivel head Dollar Tree Lampe de Poche a Pince mod

Everybody knows or should know about the stupendous Lampe de Poche from Dollar Tree. Only a buck. Review: Dollar Tree Flashlight (Lampe de Poche)

Well, there’s a new kid in town. The 2xAA swivel head Lampe de Poche a Pince. It uses 2xAA cells. Note the built-on belt clip. It’s emitter is a very sophisticated device consisting of a tungsten alloy wire contained in a vacuum filled glass vial. Never seen anything like it before, except, maybe, on a Christmas tree.

That’s too sophisto for my cretin sensibilities, so let’s replace that glass thingy with a Cree XLAMP-7090. I am also concerned that the vacuum filled glass vial might break and I and my surroundings could be sucked into the resulting vacuum implosion. So, I carefully removed the old lighting vial. It is mounted in a plastic dohickey that press fits into the Lampe body. There are spring loaded contacts that mate with contacts in the body. There is no room to mount the LED onto the top of the dohickey and get the reflector/lens to screw down. So I tossed the dohicky and just glued the LED to the reflector. I considered drilling out the hole in the reflector to press-fit the LED, but the reflector would short out against the LED contacts. I soldered wires to the contacts in Lampe’s body and to the LED. Note the shape of the tailcap spring. You need to be careful to get your polarities right:

This is a 2xAA direct drive light. Regular alkaline cells are not very bright. So I used two NiZn rechargeables. With the CREE XLAMP-7090 LED it puts out a whopping 16 lumens. The faceted reflector was designed for that vacuum filled thingy that sticks up into it. With an LED mounted to the back of the reflector, you get a somewhat ringy beam with a darkish spot in the middle:

I have a couple of these cheapies too. I though about beefing one of them up with and XR-E and driver from a Sipik68 clone, but it might melt the entire top of the light. :Sp