Jump to content

Phony Phlashlights


Recommended Posts

  • CMS Author

I was at a hamfest yesterday and saw someone with a big box full of "shaker" flashlights that he was selling for a buck a piece. I've always thought this was a really cool idea (Dan Kennedy of Great River Electronics first showed me one he bought at his local hardware store for about $30) and I figured that for a buck I could toss one in the car and it would work at least a little long after the nice three-cell MagLight in the glove compartment had become a convenient place to store dead batteries. I've seen the prices of these lights drop at hamfests - $10, $6, $3, and I resisted, but I couldn't resist $1.

 

The way a "shaker" flashlight works is like this: A coil of wire and a large capacitor inside. A magnet slides through the center of the coil guided by a tube as you shake the flashlight. The magnet moving through the coil acts as a generator, charges up the capacitor, and the LED bulb is powered by the charge on the capacitor. The real ones use a sealed reed switch activated by a sliding magnet attached to the on-off switch, so there aren't any open sliding switch contacts to get dirty. Everything is soldered inside, so there are not screwed-together metal pieces to make contact. Simple, elegant, and there's no reason why it shouldn't work nearly forever.

 

My hamfest buddy, upon seeing it in my stash, told me that some people in a newsgroup he reads regularly were talking about phony versions of this design. The knock-offs look like the real thing - the body is transparent so you can see the coil and the slider - but instead of a generator and a capacitor, they have a couple of conventional button cells and are in reality a conventional flashlight.

 

I took my $1 shaker light apart this morning and sure enough, there are two cells in it, and the sliding "magnet" isn't even magnetized. The switch isn't sealed or magnetically operated, it's just a sliding piece of metal contacting a fixed piece of metal. I'VE BEEN DUPED!!!!!!

 

Curiously, the text on the box looks like it was copied from the real thing, accurately describing the operation of both the generator and the switch. Hey, it's not a bad flashlight for a buck, and it makes a good story. And used in the same service as I'd use a real shaker light, it may very well last many years until the batteries die. I'm just glad I didn't pay $10 for it.

 

What's really amazing is how they can make something with this many molded plastic parts, a coil of real copper wire (not a large coil, but a real coil), two batteries that would probably cost $5.95 for the pair at Radio Shack, and a nicely printed box in clear and well written English, and make them so that someone can sell it for a dollar.

 

Is this a great country or what?

 

. . . uh, WHICH country? Or what?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Somebody recently told me that we're "in the biggest race to zero" they had ever seen.

We want it, and we want it now, and it better be cheap...

It's the same greedy mentality that drives people to buy obviously under priced bootleg Les Pauls. We believe that somebody will always do it for less, but with the same quality. Then we feign surprise when it just ain't so.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...