On Tue, 23 May 2017, The Real Bev wrote:
> A while back a friend and I went through Lehman Cave in Nevada. One of the
> people had a wonderful TruTorch flashlight ($56.00) which I immediately
> coveted. There are a lot of clones on Amazon and ebay, but I don't want to
> buy anything on either place (or alibaba) that I might want to return. I
> finally bought one of the $20 as-seen-on-tv Bell&Howells (same price
> everywhere) from Dick's across the street.
>
> I'm happy. Bright as shit and seems nicely made. Nuisance to have to cycle
> through modes rather than have a simple on/off switch, but you can't have
> everything.
>
> Puts the free Harbor Freight flashlights, heretofore much admired, to shame.
>
I was given a nice LED 'troublelight", it can be used as a flashlight, but
also has LEDs oriented more as a lantern, with a clamp for holding in
place, and a hoop at the top for hanging on something. But it uses "chip"
type LEDs, no epoxy coating on them, and I think I read they were Cree. I
forget the company that made it, but it's not low end either.
It's nice, bright and handy, but something draws current all the time. I
kept batteries in it for a few months after I got it about four years ago,
but if I waited long enough between use, the batteries would be dead. Not
useful. One has to unscrew something to get to the batteries, so it's not
easy to take them out when not in use.
There is a tiny red led that flashes when it's "off", that sort of thing
is supposed to be low current, but I don't know. So either that small red
LED is draining the batteries (three either AAA or AA, I forget) or
something else isn't remaining off when the switch is off.
A lot of the cheap LED flashlights just use regular white LEDs, and often
just run them off the batteries. I've taken some apart, and some haven't
even been soldered together, just the leads mashed in somewhere, the
pressure when it's altogether keeping things going, which means an
accasional whack is needed for full brightness. I also notice some of
those cheap LED flashlights, now with quite a few LEDs, often have one or
two not working, I assume bad solder or bad mechanical connection.
I did buy an LED troublight that was more like the cheap LED flashlights
in that it just had more white LEDs, and a nicad battery, and that stopped
working relatively soon after. I got it cheap, I assume it's the sort of
thing you get in the US at Harbor Freight, but it wasn't a great purchase
after all. I started to open it up, but something stalled, maybe I was
missing a screw somewhere. Either I can resurrect it, maybe a bad
conneciton, or the battery bad, or just reuse the LEDs.
Michael