"The Amazing 2000-Hour Flashlight" shows how to add a 30-cent resistor to a $5 flashlight and create a light that produces useful illumination for 2000 hours on the same battery. Detailed instructions. 54 illustrations. A half-hour project. No soldering required The standard for "useful light" is defined and various lights compared to it. Brand names and part numbers and where to buy them (Home Depot, Radio Shack, etc.) are all identified. Related topics include bypassing the resistor, rechargeable batteries, and how to substitute other battery sizes. "Don't be afraid of the dark," we chide...

Candles work great in a blackout. Unless you don't have any. Vegetable-oil lamps are more of a sure thing. The needed materials can be found in most kitchens, even where no conscious "prepping" has taken place beforehand. And the operating cost for a vegetable-oil lamp is under a penny per hour, less than any type of candle. This book, Olive Oil Lamps &c., is the second volume in our Non-Electric Lighting Series. It describes 15 different vegetable-oil lamp designs. (And if you count the variations, it's more like 22 or 23.) These are simple lamps. Each one is pictured. They're easy to...

The Hag of Halloween is a rhymed poem. In it, a young man steals candy from a trick-or-treat princess and her clown companion. He flees the scene but is abducted by The Hag and whisked off to her kingdom where (with some help from her strange daughters) she torments the young man relentlessly. He prays for forgiveness and wakens from his nightmare. But was it REALLY a dream? Maybe. Or maybe not. See if you can decide.

You can see all the books available (so far) in this series by entering "The Non-Electric Lighting Series" in the Amazon search bar above. At this point, we've gone through candles and olive oil lamps and kerosene wick-type lamps and we've arrived at Book 5: Coleman Gas Lanterns. Time to get off the porch and play with the big boys. Pressure lanterns, though not as convenient as throwing a wall switch, will produce light on par with electric. Do you know the difference between Coleman Quick-Lite and Coleman Instant-Lite? You probably should if you're into prepping. It's nice to speak the...

This book covers wick-type kerosene lamps and lanterns. It's for users, not antique dealers. How can we generate LIGHT? That is the question. Fuel substitutes, safety, operating procedures, maintenance, repair, and various lamp styles are the topics. Things to look for when buying used. Cost effectiveness. Homemade lamps. Candlepower. Those are the subjects discussed. Collector value? Never mentioned. This book covers, of course, the simple flat-wick lamps sold today in every Walmart and Family Dollar. But there's quite a bit more to it than that. As a young adult, I happened to be at my...

The first edition of this book ("The AMAZING 2000-Hour Flashlight") contained 54 illustrations. This edition ("The NEW 2000-Hour Flashlight") contains 128 illustrations. The first edition showed how to modify one flashlight, a specific Eveready model, such that it ran 2000 hours on one battery. Unfortunately, Eveready has replaced that particular light with newer models. This edition shows how to obtain extended run times using other brands - one of which runs 2200 hours, better than the original. (Incidentally, 2200 hours equates to three months of continuous running, night and day.) In...

As soon as we graduate from candles and olive oil to kerosene, the door opens onto the crazy world of bad Internet information about lamp and lantern fuels. Well, not all bad. Probably no more than 50% is silly, misinformed, or dangerous. From the FOREWORD: "Do you know the difference between white gas and white spirits? What about the difference between white spirits and mineral spirits? (Of course, there's always mineral spirits and alcoholic spirits.) How about the difference between mineral oil and mineral spirits? Or coal oil and kerosene? "There's a lot of information that you can find...