Surefire Hurricane Lamp Price drop!

I have wanted a surefire hurricane lamp / battery holder (12B), for a long time. Someone on this forum pointed out that the price did not drop along with the big drop in surefire battery prices. So I wrote (emailed) Derek McDonald, a marketing manager at Surefire, and asked/suggested this. I also suggested they consider an LED lamp. I received a quick and polite email acknowledging my communication. As with many companies, I did not expect to hear again about it. But to their credit, I received an email from Derek informing me that the price had dropped to $19.95 (from $59.95!). Thank you Derek, I ordered three!

Regards
Arden

http://www.surefire.com/cgi-bin/main.pl?pgm=co_disp&func=displ&strfnbr=6&prrfnbr=187&sesent=0,0

Nice... I would love to see a 2 or 3 led bulb with some sort of defuser. This should really increase the runtime too. Maybe it would be sold as an upgrade?

-Mike

A one watt LS in that would be very nice.

Man, that's a silly light, twelve CR123a's that you use two at a time to run a 6 volt indicator lamp. Why not just use four D cells?

Its primarily a way to use up your out of regulation 123s instead of just tossing them. 123 batts dont get totally "used up" in HOLA units and this gives you a way to "recycle" them.IMO

Do you have to keep changing the placement of the bulb? I notice there are 6 slots. If for nothing else, you can think of it as a $5 battery holder?

It was originally sold as a way for SureFire to distribute 123 cells at a lower cost than normal, years ago when they were not so easy to find, and were very expensive when you did find them. Duracell would only let SF sell their batteries with flashlights and not by themselves, so SF made the 12B Hurricane Lamp as a hopelessly impractical thing with an alledgedly useful function, but also conveniently taking 12 of those normally-expensive cells. We all know it`s just a glorified battery box, even Duracell, but it complied with the terms of their contract with SF so there wasn`t much they could do about it. That`s what I use mine for. I don`t even know where the lamp for it has gone.

Nowadays SF sell their own batteries for whatever they want to charge for them, but because the 12B *does* make a useful battery holder, it`s here to stay. If they upgraded that bulb to an LED it might even become practical as an illumination device....

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[ QUOTE ]
smokinbasser said:
Its primarily a way to use up your out of regulation 123s instead of just tossing them. 123 batts dont get totally "used up" in HOLA units and this gives you a way to "recycle" them.IMO

[/ QUOTE ]

How much runtime do you get in the Hurricane lamp after a set of cells are drained from a HOLA? Thanks

-Mike

looks like I have a project for a mod...

Is the case waterproof?

No, not waterproof. It has a little hole over the top of each battery, where you poke the lamp contact clip through.

I may get a few, but I don't know any more than what SureFire advertises. SureFire says:
<ul type="square">
[*]Provides 3+ lumens of light for an amazing 50 hours! That's almost five full nights of illumination when you need it most. Includes twelve 123A lithium batteries. Because of its low power requirement it is also an ideal place to use up the almost discharged lithium batteries from your other SureFire lights.
[*]The Hurricane lamp uses a simple electrical circuit to draw power from two of the 12 batteries at a time. Each two-battery circuit powers the light for just over eight hours, ensuring that that all of the batteries will not be rundown if you forget to turn the light off.[/list]I'm guessing that the circuit is just 2x123 and a resistor in series with a 5mm LED. If that is the case, then to get the 50 hour run time out of these 1300 mAh cells, the lamp would be running at about 26 mA and using a 100 ohm resistor.

Is that a good guess? Or is there a simple regulator in there? Does anyone know what this circuit is? If it is just a resistor feed, it seems that the light output for "used up" batteries might be much less than 3 lumens.

Paul

Unless something has changed, The simple electrical circuit is a piece of flat metal that makes the connection.
I don't have the whole thing with me but I do have the guts of it in my hand.
One end has a curl and the other end has the bulb on it.
The bulb is marked: JKL 328.
There is no resistor.
It's about the simplest electrical circuit that's possible.
+ to -

Sunspot,

Thanks for checking it out. Are you looking at the one that has an LED? Evidently the newer one have LEDs, while the older ones have incandescents and would not need a resistor.

If yours is indeed the incandescent, the fact that it is so simple supports the idea that there would be no regulator in the LED version.

Paul

Whoops. I think I may have made a bad mistake here. When I read the SureFire site info, there is no mention of an LED. Somewhere I got the idea that they were now using LEDs. And I can't seem to find where I read it.

Looks like I'm getting a little goofy. The week-end is coming just in time. Sorry if all this LED talk got someone excited.

Paul

Where did you hear the new ones have LEDs? I haven't seen that anywhere, and the picture on the website still shows an incandescent bulb.

Sorry Tyler. Perhaps there was a bit of wishful thinking in my mad dash to post the erroneous information.

Paul

This doesn't include the batteries does it? It's just the box and the lamp, right?

Batteries included. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif