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by frankie_the_yankee
Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:33 am
Forum: General Gun, Shooting & Equipment Discussion
Topic: LED Flashlight upgrades
Replies: 24
Views: 4060

FWIW in real life I am a packaging enginneer in the semiconductor industry. I design and develop the external casings for semiconductor chips that protect them from the external environment and allow for electrical connections to be made to external circuitry.

Unless poorly made, any LED is going to be many times more shock resistant than any incandescent bulb. It's just the nature of the beast. An LED is essentially a solid molded piece. There is nothing to bounce around inside. It takes a huge amount of acceleration or shock load to break the adhesive bond between the clear plastic encapsulating material and the chip, which would cause the internal wires to break and render the LED useless.

By comparison, it takes much less acceleration or shock load to break the filament of an incandescent bulb. The filament is just hanging in space where it is free to vibrate, which eventually leads to fatigue cracking and failure.

And this of course is in addition to the process where a little bit of the filament "boils off" in normal use, causing it to gradually thin out until it fails.
by frankie_the_yankee
Thu Sep 20, 2007 7:49 pm
Forum: General Gun, Shooting & Equipment Discussion
Topic: LED Flashlight upgrades
Replies: 24
Views: 4060

My Terralux TLE-6EX LED arrived today. I installed it in my 4 C cell Maglite.

I seem to get a different result from everyone else.

The led is definitely brighter and a bit "whiter", with a slight bluish cast to it. But I noticed three main differences in the beam compared to the incandescent bulb.

Sorry that I haven't figured out how to post pictures yet. I will try to describe them.

1) While the focused spot seems slightly smaller with the LED, the outline of the spot is fuzzier. From the photos others have posted, it seems most people get a sharper outline to the spot.

2) The "side beam" (the light that spills outside of the spot) is wider with the LED.

3) When focus is changed to give a wide beam (floodlight mode?) a dark spot appears in the center of the main spot. This doesn't seem to happen with the incandescent bulb, which just smoothly spreads into a wide spot beam. Also, I haven't noticed others mentioning this.

Overall, I think the upgrade is an improvement, especially as regards battery life. The package says the LED puts out 140 lumens, which is something like 2x the rating of the incandescent bulb.

It lights up the night pretty well.
by frankie_the_yankee
Tue Sep 18, 2007 12:20 pm
Forum: General Gun, Shooting & Equipment Discussion
Topic: LED Flashlight upgrades
Replies: 24
Views: 4060

Maglite model numers confuse me. I have a 4 C cell model and also a 6 D cell unit. I just ordered a Terrelux LED upgrade for the 4 C cell light. IMO, this is a great flashlight as is. FWIW, I will post comments on the performance of the LED upgrade after it arrives.

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