bit around the house & shop. They eat batteries at a pretty steady rate,
and frequently start going dim in the middle of some task where it's a
royal pain in the neck to extricate myself and go get new batteries or a
bulb. One of them died yesterday (bulb), and it occured to me that an
LED version would be a big improvement. Armed with the following list of
requirements, I went on-line:
1) Rear cap push button to turn on. I want to be able to easily grab the
thing with one hand and turn it on & off while pointing it. I have one
that uses a twist-the-cap switch, and I really don't like it nearly as
much as the old fashioned push-button flavor.
2) Small diamter to get into tight spots. The AA one I have is about
3/4" in diameter, and it's a bit clunky. The AAA one is a bit thinner,
and works very well in this regard.
3) Use vaguely normal batteries. I have a really skinny LED penlight
that uses weird batteries. They are nearly impossble to find, and
expensive. I'd prefer to avoid AAAA cells, even if they are becoming a
bit more common.
4) I'd prefer not to have to spend an arm & a leg for one. I can buy new
EverReady's for under $5. $15 is near the top of my comfort zone on
price. Buying a $40 Luxeon replacement bulb would not be an option.
Unfortunately, I pretty much struck out. Streamlight has one that uses
four(!) AAAA's, and it looks nice, but the push button is only
momentary-on, you have to screw the cap down to get it to stay on. They
can be had for ~$13:
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Underwater Kinetics has one that is as close as I could find, but even
though it uses AAA's, it has a bulbous lens assembly that makes it as
bulky as my AA penlight. They sell for around $12.
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The other option is to find an LED replacement bulb for the $5
Everyready AAA ones, but the only one I've seen is pretty pricey at $18:
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So, before I shell out for one or more of these, I thought I would pass
along my research results and see if anyone had a better answer. The one
other interesting option I ran across is a build-your-own replacement
bulb web site:
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Thanks for any suggestions.
Doug White