[AT] [Bulk] Re: Todays flashlights

[Stephen Offiler]

Candlepower is not the best way to evaluate a flashlight.  It is a value
that can be manipulated very easily by your typical unscrupulous
marketing/sales people.  The American National Standards Institute
recognized there was a lot of monkey business going on, and stepped in with
a new standard just a couple years ago, called ANSI/NEMA FL-1.

One of the FL-1 ratings is lumens, which is an unambiguous measurement of
total light output, but it does not describe how tight (spot) or wide
(flood) the beam is.  Same lumens in a spot beam will seem very bright (but
over a much smaller area) vs. a flood beam.  FL-1 also rates by distance,
how far the beam of light will travel until it peters out to a given
(fairly low) intensity. Knowing both lumens and distance on flashlights
that are legitimately rated to FL-1 will allow you to compare and choose.
High lumens with short distance means you're looking at a flood beam, for
example.  A very tight beam that travels far is only good if you typically
need to see something a long way off.  It's not very good at all if you
are, say, changing a tire or something.  The spot is small and terribly
bright when used upclose.

By the way, FL-1 also rates runtime, which is how long it runs until the
batteries peter out to 10% of the intial lumen output.

On to Maglites.  The owner, Anthony Maglica, is a steadfast, diehard MADE
IN USA kind of guy. Check:

http://maglite.com/about/history

I am seeing some Maglite discussion here, on the mutiple D-cell lights,
C-cell, and the ones taking 2 AA's which are called MiniMags.  If you have
older ones around, you can convert to LED using kits supplied by third
parties.  For the MiniMags, an outfit called NiteIze has some
cost-effective kits.  You can get these all over the Internet, and I've
seen them in camping stores like REI.

http://www.niteize.com/collection/LED-Upgrades.asp


For the C- and D-cell lights, there are a bunch of LED conversion kits out
there, sometimes replacing the whole head and requiring fancier power
sources. The cost-effective ones are called "drop-ins" because it's really
just an LED built into the shape of the incandescent bulb that normally
fits.  I have a couple of TerraLux that I'm pretty happy with:

http://terraluxportable.com/products/led-conversion-kits/


SO






On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Dan Glass <dglass at numail.org> wrote:

> I never heard of a flashlight that was too bright.  My biggest one is
> six million candlepower and I would still buy a brighter one if I could
> find it.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>