I made my own flashlight cheap! (joking thread)

Powered by 8 D cell batteries and weighing a handy 4.5 lbs it easily puts out more than 300 lumens of light!
-The lamp is an incandescent designed to be an extra headlight for off road vehicles
-solidly constructed out of duct tape, bare copper wire, rubber bands, and mdf
-the (almost) best thing to come out of 5 minutes of my time and things laying around the house
-0% waterproof and 100% awesome
-easy single mode operation: just shove the loose copper wire under a rubber band and you are good to go
-totally not safe
All joking aside I think that it would be pretty cool to replace the Incandescent bulb with a high output LED, use some lithium batteries, get a waterproof project box, add a driver for different modes, somehow get the LED to point towards the reflector right at the focal point,.... you know what I am going to stick with buying flashlights and making knives not the other way around.



and comparing my thrunite T10 which runs off of a single AA, weighs about 1/8 lbs, and puts out about 170 lumens

I am going way more than 300 lumen. Pleasant beam color for sure. Safety issues aside, that thing is pimp. Since it is obviously EDC ready, I would suggest packing it in your checked luggage verses your carry on. I may raise some TSA eyebrows otherwise.

Yeah, I think I should add a pocket clip for putting it on my belt. :devil:

honestly.... how many of us haven't done something like this at one time or another? I'm all in favor of playing around with stuff, learning, becoming inspired to improve and refine a design, etc. That might be why I became an engineer (along with wanting to have a fun job).

Most of my hobby tinkering has been with bicycle lights, and I've done a few incandescent-to-LED conversions on them. It's very difficult to properly retrofit a LED into a reflector and get any kind of decent performance. I usually slip a TIR optic into the housing and remove the reflector. And then there's the issue of heatsinking the LED. After a while, I've realized that I usually just want to keep the switch, battery housing, and mounting bracket from the original light and remove the rest.

Joking or not, I commend you for wiring up a few things and being creative! ....and for creating a fun thread!

Ok, I have tinkered with electricity since I was a child. I am probably just going to use this thread to post some of the things I have made or worked on.
I have done:
electroplating, salt water etching, welding, I attempted to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water but I was using AC .
Here is something that I was involved with, A morse code signaler.
The top one can actually be hooked up to a HAM radio and the second one is just to practice for earning the signaling merit badge.
We had the beepers hooked up to 9 volt batteries and I had the bright idea of connecting a single christmas light to it.

Tre_Asay said:

We had the beepers hooked up to 9 volt batteries and I had the bright idea of connecting a single christmas light to it.

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hmmm... this could be linked up to one of my minor obsessions.. optical communications! You could use lights to communicate in a "secure" way. i.e. it would be hard for someone to intercept it. Of course, you have to have a literal line of sight to the other person in order to make this work. Adding optics improves the "antenna" gain and makes it more secure. If you add an infra-red emitter and detector, then you can make it even more secure!!

I need to find time to build an infra-red optical link for sending audio back and forth. Seems like a fun project to play with.

Heck, I'd say toss it in a plastic bag and mount it on your bicycle. No more issues with cars not seeing you!

DrafterDan said:

Heck, I'd say toss it in a plastic bag and mount it on your bicycle. No more issues with cars not seeing you!

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Are you referring to the big light? If so, I am sad to say that I already have a LED bike light that works well enough , it puts out about 200 lumens and I bought it from an REI used gear sale for something like $5

Steve K said:

hmmm... this could be linked up to one of my minor obsessions.. optical communications! You could use lights to communicate in a "secure" way. i.e. it would be hard for someone to intercept it. Of course, you have to have a literal line of sight to the other person in order to make this work. Adding optics improves the "antenna" gain and makes it more secure. If you add an infra-red emitter and detector, then you can make it even more secure!!

I need to find time to build an infra-red optical link for sending audio back and forth. Seems like a fun project to play with.

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I remember a few weeks ago someone on laserpointerforums was asking about a low powered infrared laser module to use as a communication device for a school project. I also saw the idea of using a laser reflected off of a window to record audio from a building. RE: the Xmas light, it burned out in a few minutes but I like to imagine that it put out over 150 unfocused lumens before it did, that sucker lit up houses across the street.

Str8stroke said:

I am going way more than 300 lumen. Pleasant beam color for sure. Safety issues aside, that thing is pimp. Since it is obviously EDC ready, I would suggest packing it in your checked luggage verses your carry on. I may raise some TSA eyebrows otherwise.

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I thought under current TSA regs all electronic devices must be in carry-on luggage.

Nice frankenlight by the way. Very much in the spirit of Halloween!

Fireclaw18 said:

I thought under current TSA regs all electronic devices must be in carry-on luggage.

Nice frankenlight by the way. Very much in the spirit of Halloween!

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Thanks, I think that it is actually the brightest light I will have on halloween. So much for getting a new flashlight soon, but I am going to get more flashlights before next year. :santa:

I also put this together just for old times sake:
I actually considered crossing out the "choc" and replacing it with "flash"




Gosh, I really need to get my hands on a working soldering iron.

Re: I made my own flashlight cheap!

...I crossed out the word Surefire and wrote Ultrafire on it!

Joking thread, right?

more_vampires said:

Re: I made my own flashlight cheap!

...I crossed out the word Surefire and wrote Ultrafire on it!

Joking thread, right?

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Nah, what would be really cheap is if you took the ultrafire flashlights and sold them as surefire flashlights for double the price.