Using ball cap-bill light for cloce work.
Not long ago Bill Tindall reported how he added a light to his router, and I followed with a suggestion that using one of the ball cap-bill lights is another good way to get light down where otherwise might be in my own shadow.
However I would like to add a word of caution. Recently I was cutting dovetails on my table saw using a little sled dedicated to that purpose. It’s only about 10” between 5” high front and back fences. With a fresh 1/4” bottom to match the blade, gives a zero clearance on each side of the blade, so looking around the board to line up the scribe line with the edge of kerf, my head was casting a shadow right where I needed more light. I normally keep a cap handy with a light on it, but had left it down at “Frogwarts” my weekend cabin. I needed a couple of other supplies, so drove to my nearest Ace hardware, and came back with a new to me cap light. It’s a little NEBO brand with 400 lumens on the brightest + med and low. I didn’t need the brightest since I was in so close and didn’t know how much charge was in the battery, so was using the lowest settings. I seem to recall some discussion on this forum about LED flicker, but I thought or maybe misunderstood it to be more of a blinking before expiring. However now it seems that the different brightness settings has a longer duration between pulses of the same intensity for the lower settings. When I leaned around the board I was cutting, the blade looked like the saw was almost stopped, or like the wagon wheels in movies of our youth turning backwards due to their position with each frame of old movie reels. I’ll admit I had my earbuds in cranked up a bit plus hearing protection, and the shop vac running so I couldn’t hear the saw, at first was puzzled that the saw was stopping. I resisted the urge to touch the side of blade before realizing what was happening.
I wanted to share this word of caution since I mentioned it earlier. Otherwise I like this little light a lot. It’s a lot smaller than all the other many headlamps with head-straps, and the recharge battery uses min-usb. The small spot is GREAT for hilighting the shine on a dull blade for sharpening. I think they might have listening when John K Jordan commented on not wanting a switch that requires pushing the button through all the functions to turn it off. In this case it also has red and green, but after it’s been on any setting for about 7 seconds, the next will always be off. Then the next will be back to the last level of brightness.
Here is a link to this little light.
https://nebo.acgbrands.com/en_US/mycro-headlamp.html
