Mac Mag Battery Question

Never mind, a good hard shake popped the battery holder out. Wild light!

So I get the batteries in and turn it on. I hear tick tick tick and I can see a blue spark jumping to the filament but no light comes on. Then I decide to give the head a little twist and OUCH, I received a hell of a shock for my efforts.

After a moment of recovery from that rather rude treatment I unscrewed the head to discover it filled with powdered glass...hmmmm, not good, not good at all. Not sure what happened exactly but this one is going back I think...

Well, not sure if it was a bad lamp assembly or my own fault here but Chris is taking care of me straight away so hopefully all will be fixed shortly. Can't believe the shock this thing delivered though, wow! No need for the extra cup of coffee this morning.

Dang! Glad to hear you're OK Peter. There is a lot of juice being used to make all that light!

Take care of those hands...no more shocks, you have a bunch of very excited folks waiting on a few expected runs of sharp goodies!

Not surprised at all that you are getting taken care of, though...you bought from one of the good ones!

Peter, does your light have a big fat looking bulb or a very long and skinny looking bulb? I'm trying to figure out if yours has a stock or modified one.

In any case, if your light has a long, thin bulb it means that the outer bulb envelope has been removed in order to use a reflector with a smaller hole and in improve the beam. The only problem with that is that the bulb is more vulnerable to breakage because the thin glass structure is so fragile to something touching it. When the head is off the light it's susceptable to braking by very little force and when the head is on the bulb can be broken from screwing the head down too far causing the inside of the lens to make contact with the tip of the bulb.

Anyhow, I'm not sure if this is even relevant, but the thought occurred to me when you were seeing a blue arc and then got zapped.

Yeah, I think what happened was I cranked it down too far and broke the base of the bulb. Hey, I didn't know! Anyway, once the bulb was broken the wire was exposed and that was sparking. I guess when I tightened the head a little further something touched together and zap. Felt like when I used to be hanging wallpaper and cutting around a light socket with a bare razor blade and if I cut just a little too deep I'd get nailed. It was especially bad in those old 1920's houses with the ancient bakelite sockets where the cloth covered wires actually connected on the front.

A HID light takes a little bit to warm up. His thread says 60 lumens in 2 seconds and full light in 10 seconds... I think. So, turn it on and wait a bit.