Ancient Web: McLeish Turned Flashlight Mods Into a Workbench Archive

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before buying a flashlight with precisely the emitter, optic, body, and user interface you wanted became routine, enthusiasts could build the combination themselves. Sometimes the results needed their own webpage.

Visit the flashlight modification archive

The index at dmcleish.com introduces itself as a growing collection of cool, goofy, and possibly stupid ideas, mostly concerning flashlights. It also warns visitors not to expect consistent navigation, formatting, or coherence.

That is an unusually accurate description of a personal engineering notebook.

The projects progress chronologically through links to photographs and individual experiments. Early entries include a clear epoxy lens fitted to an Arc AAA, an Arc LS head attached to a SureFire E1 body, a titanium-bodied light with a tail switch, and adapters for combining parts that their manufacturers had not necessarily designed to meet.

When LEDs were components, not a specification on a box

Much of the index is about making high-power Luxeon LEDs cooperate with bodies and reflectors designed around different lighting technology. Entries describe five-watt emitters in SureFire M2 and C2 configurations, a royal-blue Luxeon, wide-angle flood optics, and custom reflectors.

The practical questions are immediate: will the head fit, how will the battery connect, where does the switch go, and what kind of beam comes out? The archive includes beam shots as well as component modifications, allowing the reader to see that an elegant mechanical solution is only half of a useful flashlight.

Other projects are proudly odd. One entry proposes a SureFire-style head on an Eveready lantern; another joins lights using an existing T-slot. The attraction is not uniform commercial polish. It is the experimentation.

The archive has links to successive pages of newer work, so the index itself forms a rough development diary. The original subpages are not all equally accessible to a modern browser, and a title alone cannot establish whether a particular modification performed well. But the visible index documents the questions enthusiasts were asking and the hardware families they worked with.

The site belongs to an older style of technical sharing: one person does the machining, wiring, photography, and explanation, then leaves the messy evidence online for the next tinkerer.

Browse the original flashlight-modification index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.