Have you seen these cool torch’s that you can shake and they charge? You can buy them at most of the co-op’s, hardware stores and camping stores for about R80 they’re really cool and they work well.

So today I went shopping and went into one of those little shops that sells practically everything. And they had those cool shake and charge torches for R20, which is incredibly cheap so I buy 5 as Christmas presents. When I get home I decided to check out the torches again I realise that they are rather cheap copies, which doesn’t really bother me, as long as it works as one of those cool shake torches.

While looking at one of the torch’s I noticed that the little coil the magnet passes through appears to be broken so I thought I would take the torch apart and fix it. The minute I took the torch apart I realised that the coil wasn’t connected to anything, the little rectifier wasn’t on the PCB board and there was no super cap that the coil would normally charge.

These cheap torches I purchased are fakes they don’t even have magnets in them to move through the coils just pieces of metal, the coils aren’t even connected to anything.

Below are pictures of what the box of the fake torch looks like and what the fake torch looks like.

Below you can see the inside of the fake torch, you’ll see that all that is fitted to the little PCB is two bits of metal that make up the switch.

And below is what the fake torch looks like from outside.

Below you can see a comparison between the fake torch (the one on top) and the real torch (the one at the bottom) if you view the hi-res picture you’ll see that the real one has a much bigger coil on it, a bigger magnet and more electronics.

So hopefully now you’ll be able to spot the fake and not make the same mistake I did.

So what am I going to do with the fake ones?
Well it appears that the PCB on these fake torch’s are exactly the same as my real torch, so if I get a rectifier, a “super cap”, magnet and some copper wire I should be able to make proper torch out of it. While I’m at it I might also change the LED to one of those “high power” ones.