1987 Penlight mod (A bit of History)

The first LED mod I did was to one of those aluminum penlights with a pin switch in the back. You pushed the switch in and to the side a bit and it locked on, pushed it back from the side and the pin popped out for off. I bought a bag (50)of pre-focused bulbs for $5.00 from Jerrico (now American Science and Surplus). These were modified by breaking out the glass bulb and soldering in a resistor and a "superbright" red led. Got a lot of use out of them, great for checking uncut gemstones for flaws, working around the darkroom and changing settings on my telescope. Made up and sold or traded about 40-45 bulb mods. Very popular With my Astronomy Club.



The yellow stripe is a piece of phosphoresent tape (also from Jerrico) to help find it when I dropped it and it rolled under the darkroom table.



Not the greatest beam pattern by todays standards but state of the art fifteen years ago..

It's still working but is now in semi-retirement..

nice! very elegant looking.

how is it powered?

I modded one of these penlight torches to LED... it was fine until the plastic head was crushed, but the LED continued to work even so!
It was about the second mod I ever did.

Could this be about the oldest LED torch owned by CPF members. 1987 was about the earliest time for super-hi-intensity red LED's... up until then you maybe had to connect 10's of LED's together to get any appreciable amount of useable light. I always dreamed it would be possible that one day the fragile glass bulbs would eventually give way to solid state lighting in the same way that valve technology gave way to the transistor and the integrated silicon chip.

I don't know whether this is the place to post about the oldest solid state torches we may have but it would be ineresting to find out the earliest dated modded or commercial solid state torch owned by CPF members!

Oh....Those! I have one: unmodded. I call it "The Penlight from Hell. Made by Satanic Flashlight Company."

To think this was actually a primary backpacking light for me at one time. {shudder}

I made a bunch of those of those back in the early to mid 1970's and published an article on it in "Soldier of Fortune" Magazine in the early 80's.

There is a reprint of that article here:http://az123.com/darksbane/article.jpg

About six months after that article was published, some company came out with a a production run of the lights and sold them through firearms and police type publications for a couple of years.

I think they cost about $35.00 back then. I should have gone into business making them myself, although I don't know how many that outfit actually sold.

My first "LED flashlight" was a loose LED and a coin cell- Used it through Ranger School, although the cadre probably would have taken it away from me if they had found me using it.