A 1000 HOUR $5 LED FLASHLIGHT

Eveready flashlight and modifies it so that it runs for over 360 hours.

In brief, the poster (luxstar), modified an Eveready 5109LS LED flashlight by adding a 56-Ohm resistor. The flashlight before modification had a 25 lumen output and a 64 hour runtime.  On its own, unmodified, that is pretty impressive for a $5 flashlight.

The Hack (Modification)

1.  I unscrewed the Black Ring and removed the Lenses Assembly.
2.  Using a pair of wire cutters, I cut the longer Red Wire right in the middle.
3.  Using a pair of wire strippers, I stripped 1/4 inch of coating from the end of each wire.
4.  Using a micro screwdriver that was a little less than 1/16 inch in diameter (you could also use a small drill bit), I wrapped each of the resistor wire leads around the screw driver to form a coil, leaving about 1/4″ uncoiled on each end.
5.  I inserted one of the stripped Red Wires into the coil on one side of the resistor.  Using a pair of needle nose pliers, I crimped the coil making sure I had wire to wire contact.  I repeated the process for the other Red Wire and the other coil of the resistor.
6.  I soldered each crimped coil/stripped Red Wire Connection.

I have average soldering skills and had no problems making these modifications in about 15 minutes.  Here is how the finished lenses assembly looked.

Check out instructibles.com to see the different way luxstar soldered his resistor to the lenses assembly.  His method doesn’t requiring any wiring stripping and may not even require coiling the resistor wire leads.

I showed you the above modifications (cutting and stripping the longer red wire and then coiling the resistor leads) in case you don’t have a soldering iron or don’t trust your soldering skills.  If you don’t want to do any soldering, once you have crimped the wires and resistor leads together, you could use some conductive wire glue to make sure your connections are solid.  Conductive wire glue is available at Radio Shack, for about $5.