Ron Brown, the author of The Amazing 2000-Hour Flashlight eBook, contacted me a few days about it and I immediately went to Amazon and bought a copy. After all, 99 cents for such good knowledge is a steal!
Though hundreds of pages long, it’s a fast read, includes plenty of images, and explains the process step-by-step that even I couldn’t screw them up. 😉
Obviously, I can’t tell you how to make your own 2000-hour flashlight but I can show you the results of my own experiment this weekend. First, however, here’s the book description from Amazon:
“The Amazing 2000-Hour Flashlight” shows how to add a 30-cent resistor to a $5 flashlight and create a light that produces useful illumination for 2000 hours on the same battery. Detailed instructions. 54 illustrations. A half-hour project. No soldering required! The standard for “useful light” is defined and various lights compared to it. Brand names and part numbers and where to buy them (Home Depot, Radio Shack, etc.) are all identified. Related topics include bypassing the resistor, rechargeable batteries, how to substitute other battery sizes, and competing long-life products (though, as it turns out, nothing comes remotely close to 2000 hours). A free chapter from “Lanterns, Lamps & Candles,” a different book by the same author, is included as a bonus. The Forward to “Flashlights” was written by Gaye Levy, proprietor of the Web site “Backdoor Survival.”
Like the description says, it’s a few dollars worth of parts added to an inexpensive flashlight. If you already have the flashlight then that makes it even less expensive but I ended up buying two news flashlights because I wanted as good of test results as I could get. With that in mind, here’s what I found…
This is a picture of the two brand new flashlights in a dark bathroom without any modifications. I did notice that the flashlight on the left had a slight yellow hue to the light output (no idea why) even though I bought them from the same store at the same time. Regardless, the light output seems to be about the same:
And here is a picture of the same two flashlights with only one of the flashlights modified as per instructions in the book (note: I choose to modify the flashlight with the yellow hue from the photo above):
I feel it’s safe to say you can tell which flashlight has been modified, right? Just in case, I took another photo of the flashlights side-by-side shining down a partially-lit hallway to make it perfectly clear:
Again, I think you can tell which flashlight has been modified but, just in case, it was the flashlight on the left. The thing is that it doesn’t matter a whole lot if the modified flashlight puts out less light, that’s to be expected.
Anyway, just out of curiosity, I wandered around the house in the dark Saturday night switching between the two (modified and un-modified flashlights) and, while I could tell a difference at longer ranges, I wasn’t disappointed in the modified flashlight. It did what I needed.
Now, have I tried to run the flashlights to see how long they really lasted? No. I did, however, choose to modify the other flashlight so that I now have two 2000-hour flashlights that I’m happy to let my kids use whenever they want. 🙂
Here’s the link to the Kindle edition: The Amazing 2000-Hour Flashlight eBook
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