A must have tool

Anyone who has ever done any work on a car has experienced this. Most of us just either come to live with the fact that we can't see anything, and develop an higher sense of touch; or get one of our less mechanically competent friends to be the dedicated 'light bitch'. The fact is - the usual methods of lighting in a garage just plain suck!

First of all, no matter how many lights you put on the ceiling, they will not help you any when you're laying under the car trying to get that steering rack in place. Actually, the brighter the lights up top, the darker it will seem in areas where you actually have to work.

Second, flashlights are just plain impractical. Any time I have to use one to work on a car I always remember Doom 3, and the #1 reason why I quit playing it about 20 minutes through*. The beam is so focused, you have to:

• Point the flashlight very precisely at the specific part you're working on, remember where it is and what it looks like.
• Put the flashlight down, grab a tool, and try to work on that part.
• After failing, grab the flashlight again to look for that part, and make sure you haven't already broken it.
• Grab the tool and fail again, since you just haven't developed that sense of touch just yet!
• Try and prop the flashlight somehow to shine where you need it to, only to have it fall into the engine bay, usually somewhere between the engine and the firewall.
• Spend the next hour trying to get it out.
• Since it was on that whole hour, the batteries are dead, and you (of course) don't have any spares.
  

You get the idea.

Third, shop lamps. Specifically designed for mechanics, and used by such for thousands of years. I don't know what it is about them, but they always end up shining in your eyes instead of at the area you are working on. It's inevitable. If you have an incandescent one, they will also burn out and leave you stumbling in the dark with a transmission on your chest. A quick fix with one of the living room bulbs, but annoying still!

Well, getting off of my rant and to the point -
Last weekend my brother and I ran in the Son of Sno*Drift TSD rally. Since a good chunk of it happens after dark, I bought a headlight to make reading the route instructions easier. Just a cheap LED Energizer one at Wal-Mart. I will spare you the detailed review, but I decided to give it a try and use it to do some work on the RS and Accord these past few days. Let me just say that this thing is amazing! It runs forever (specs say something like 50 hours) off of 3 AAA batteries, it is brighter than any smaller flashlight, it shines EXACTLY where you want it to, and obviously never in your eyes. It is so incredibly convenient that I am kicking myself for not buying one sooner. For under $10, it is definitely a MUST HAVE tool!








* For those not as nerdy as myself, in Doom 3, the flashlight is considered a weapon... but not in a sense that you can actually kill something with it, rather in a sense that you can't have another weapon active while you're using the flashlight. Considering that the game is extremely dark, you either can't see where you're shooting, or can't shoot at what you're seeing. Quite annoying!