Headlight hack! Add a brightness control and LED to an old headlamp

Do you have an old headlamp? Do you want a high-brightness LED headlamp? Do you have limited electronics knowledge? Well I present to you the LED headlamp hack! I had an old head lamp that was begging to be hacked, it was old and didn't work. So I took my trusty drill, wire strippers, and soldering iron and made it into this ever-so-amazing LED headlamp. This is how I did it and how you can do it too.

Step 1 Tools and materials

You will need,

Tools:
Soldering gun
wire strippers (optional but very helpful)
tin snips (again, optional but very helpful)
helping hands (helpful and again optional)
drill / drill bits 
knife

Stuff:
Old headlamp
wire
solder
led (preferably high brightness.)
resistor (see step 2 for choosing the right one)
10k POT
9V Battery
9V Battery holder
toggle switch or push on push off switch
circuit board (optional but helpful)

Comments

[-max-]

try the T6 led from cree, 1000 lumens, 100 lumens per watt, and 1000 LUMENS!!!

[TheGreatS]

ooooo, I'm gettting interested. I'll see if I can get my hands on one of these. (1000 lumens, that's intense!)

[-max-]

i know. i have a WF502B flashlight from eBay, it lights up mountains

[sshuggi]

Cool hack! Not sure where your knowledge of electronics is, but there are more efficient ways of dimming LED's. (However, they're much more complicated and use more components.) With this setup, the battery is still losing energy by means of heat in the pot when you dim the LED. For the sake of simplicity, this does great.

[TheGreatS]

My electronics knolage is not all that high. The only circuts that I have made up my self (With out a scematic) have been cictuts that only take one have path, but I'm still working on getting better. By the way thanks for the clarification on the heat lost from the pot. I'll edit that.