Dude, get you self an iron its a five second job and as you say never too late, some like that is a great thing to learn on, getting one will really open up what you can do and it wont set you back very much.
here in the uk they have stopped selling the high wattage blubs you now can get a halogen inside a "normal" shaped housing
Small oven type blubs are still permitted.
Im just guessing here, but i believe that a capacitor would be used to store a little power running to the controller chip and when this power has been used it will forget which mode it was in and return back to its default setting.
where i work about half of the light fittings have a back up battery and when the power does fail the light are powered by this system, they produce about 50% they normally produce on the mains power, also with in the fire exit route all the light along the way have a the back up system all have...
Hey,
Which heat sink did you use for this mod? and is it a D size Mag? its a very smart looking and clean cut down, looking at doing something the same for my bike.
Cheers, acezone