Neat lamp, but if it’s like every other cranked phone charger light I’ve seen, you’ll get a millisecond of talk time for every four hours you crank it… along with hand cramps.
Anybody got personal experience with the crank-vs-light time?
Cellphone charging uninterests me.
The concertina shape would lend itself to being foot pump charged, at least a bit easier than the ergo-tastrophy which is hand crank almost anything beyond the time/effort of a pencil sharpener
Izzat David Thewlis?
I bought two hand-crank LED flashlights (torches) on a boingboing recommendation. ‘These are great and cheap!’ Cheap yes, great no: they are both non-functional after less than a year. Negative 4 stars. I think the gradual linkbaitization is ruining this site. Heck it isn’t even gradual, every other post is a amazon spiffback. Combine that with the ghastly redesign (really? just 18 posts in a page? lemme guess: advertising) and I’m spending more time away from bb. Might be time to switch home pages. And so it goes…
avoid at all cost
Okay, how do you enter a promo code on amazon?
(edit: nevermind it is the very very very last step before you place the order…weird that it is AFTER payment info. can’t believe i’ve never used an amazon promo code before…)
D’oh! Wish I had seen that before I threw out several several-year-old hand-cranks. Waaaaah!
thx! mb my son and I will mod the now-useless torches. The joule-thief part looks tricksy, so mb we’ll start with the super capacitor (looks like about $2.50 or so? that sounds do-able)
I don’t think it applies here, but I was surprised to learn that many of the cheap lever-operated ones are fakes. In those the lever doesn’t actually do anything except forcing the user to be economical with the hard-wired non-rechargeable battery.
How many cranks in an iPhone?
never had that problem, 1 s talk time equals 1 s crank time here 
Learn from… ?
I have a russian squeezelight that has no battery, just a heavy flywheel. It’s 20 years old and works perfectly.
When the light bulb burned out, I had to buy 30 of them from Russian army surplus, because regular bulbs can’t take the wild AC the windings throw out. But 30 mildewed soviet-era bulbs were cheap on eBay and a little chlorine bleach killed the stuff growing on them so that’s all OK.
It has a bakelite housing and bearings made of oiled raw wool. Super low tech and ultra reliable!
I uh, whoah. wow.
Uh, does your spouse have an insurance policy on you? I need to talk to her. TOTALLY UNRELATED SUBJECT.
This orange thing looks like the housing was made from the exact same molds as my ancient black one. I don’t know anything about the vendor website, though.
Note, some people don’t like these because the geared lever that drives the flywheel is noisy. I figure I already gave away my position by shining a light, so I don’t really care, but I do try not to get too terribly close to tents full of sleeping people when I’m using mine.
