Maglite

[Willy Eckerslyke]

...which are never sold in 3s.

That's not my definition of convenient.

[Thomas Prufer]

Ahh, chuck it inna drawer and buy a LED thing with a driver. I have a 2 cell Maglite with a Maglite LED drop-in, and an extra-bright 3 cell with a LED driver module made and sold by an engineer as a hobby.

The Maglites are great as a club, for driving a nail, for freezing hands off in cold weather, all accompnied by a doughnut-shaped ring of yellowish light. Granted, 3 D cells keep on giving light long after a single AA, but...

I have a similar flashlight to this one:

RC-N2 model, which doesn't turn up, superseded?), and am very happy with it. Much brighter than a Xenon Maglite, lighter, light stays bright until the battery is sucked completely empty. Runs on AA and also lithium cells that I got very cheap as out-of-date stock. The strobe/flashing is annoying; the earliest ones just had on/off, but my wife got that one and isn't giving it back. The flashlight come from China via registered mail -- and it takes weeks and weeks and weeks to arrive...

Thomas Prufer

[Richard Tobin]

When I make a cake I use 6oz of flour. Flour is not sold in 6oz packets, but I don't find that inconvenient.

-- Richard

[Marcus Houlden]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2012 17:44:38 +0000 (UTC), Richard Tobin wrote the following to uk.misc:

Make bigger cakes?

mh.

[Steve Terry]

You'd rather pay £1 for 3 cells!?

I'm amazed that Poundland are currently selling 20 x JCB brand carbon zinc cells (10 x AA with 10 x AAA) (5p per cell!)

Steve Terry

[charles]

You can get maglites with LED "bulbs". The 2AA version is excellent. the

3D version is still an offensive weapon. Not so with plastic things.

[charles]

but you can get belt loops which will hold a 2 or 3 D version.

[Steve Terry]

I've a friend who's a security guard, last Christmas i bought him a

4D maglite, not so much that he needed a good torch on nights but that (allegedly) they make a fantastic and legal substitute for a cosh.

Steve Terry

[Bob Eager]

In which case it definitely needs to be an LED one, as bulbs would fail with all the mechanical shock.

[Steve Terry]

He has converted it to LED but i can see that as a drawback, his reaction speed could be slowed by calculating the cost of replacement after using it to end an argument.

Steve Terry

[Richard Tobin]

I don't think the courts will fall for that. Especially now that you have admitted it.

-- Richard

[Steve Terry]

Admitted what about who?

Steve Terry

[dennis]

Conspiracy by you and your friend?

[Alan Braggins]

They make a 6-cell version too, and you can get accessories like

comes a point where persuading a court that you weren't planning to use it as a weapon in advance becomes tricky though.

[August West]

Planning to use it isn't necessary, simply not having a lawful reason is enough for conviction.

[Alan Braggins]

But there's an obvious lawful reason for having a torch. A lawful reason for having a torch deliberately adapted to be more effective as a weapon may be harder to show.

("planning to use it" may have been a poor choice of words - I don't mean to suggest it would be used for anything other than self-defense, but that's not a lawful reason for carrying a weapon that would otherwise be illegal.)

[August West]

There's an obvious lawful reason for having a baseball bat, too.

[Bob Eager]

A lady I know, in her seventies, carries a baseball bat in her car. She was told off when she went through Customs at Dover and they inspected her car. They told her to buy a couiple of baseballs to keep with it.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

I have a Maglite-alike which has been a really nice torch over the years, but thanks to its slightly non-Maglite head is a sod to upgrade with any drop-in module. Looks like it's a simple LED bulb for that. I agree, the Chinese fresh-sheet designs are much better and I have a couple of them already, but the old Mag-alike has sentimental value, as well as its offensive weapon capability.

[Curlytop]

Fevric J. Glandules set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time continuum:

the Xenon only gives 40.6 lumens over the base Krypton 36.5 lumens.

As the voltage goes up so does the current. Power (and hence output brightness) is related to the product of voltage and current. For a linear device (current directly proportional to voltage) the power would go as the square of the voltage.

Lights are notoriously non-linear. For a filament bulb, it is found experimentally that the current is roughly proportional to the square root of the voltage so the light output would go as voltage to the power 3/2.

I don't know how a xenon bulb would behave but it's certainly not linear.