What got you started as a light lover?

Ive been thinking about this for awhile and ill share mine.

My love of lights got me started when the big earth quake hit in 1989?

My pops walked in after the quake with 2 blister packs of 3D and 2AAA. One pack for him and the other for me. (im an only child) The color was evergreen, we dont have them anymore.

When we needed lights we always went and got the blister packs of 3D with mini-mag 2aa....

I still have my old 3D and minimags....

All this talk makes me want to go out and buy more mini-mags/mags...

i got a check coming from energizer.....

I always thought they were cool but was more into knives. Always had mags of various sizes around, but always found something else to spend the bucks on Then the Emerson/Surefire CQC-8/C2 set came out. I'd always wanted an 8 so figured this was my shot. AS a side benefit I got to see what all the fuss about Surefires was. Well I got it and was blown away. After that I started looking at lights in a different way. While I don't have a ton of lights, I do have a good number of high quality lights today as well as a stockpile of batteries. I gotta admit, in the big scheme of things the lights make me feel more secure than the knives do.

uh, i don't know. i didn't even REALIZE i was a light lover till i googled something and stumbled on this forum. i just knew i liked flashlights,even had an irrational thing for flashlights. this forum made me realize that most of what's out there is junk,and that my stuff ranged from junk to so-so.now, in the past month since joining, i've purchased two surefires, two fenix's,and a streamlight, and am shortly going to get a dereelght DBS, somekind of inova, and who knows what else.

Auto repair.

My first lite was StreamLight 1w Luxeon, and I thought that thing was fantastic. I would hold it in my teeth while doing auto repair and eventually it was missing a lot of paint.

Monsters under my bed

Phase one: Eveready Outdoorsman. I remember laying in bed marveling at the beam floating around the walls and ceiling.

Phase two: A surefire 6P old style, given to me by my brother many years ago.

I had a very cheap plastic 2D flashlight when I was a kid, back when almost every flashlight was made from sheet steel. It had a "military" signal switch, for sending important Morse code messages
Back then, made in Japan was a bad thing. The light survived a couple of leaked sets of Ray-O-Vac zinc-carbon batteries while the stamped steel flashlights rusted badly. I would misplace it then find it again a year or two later, wash it out with vinegar, relamp it, and it would work. I even learned to use a soldering iron to clean the lead oxide and reform the middle contact of the PR bulb.

The plastic threads of the body finally gave out from my frequent unscrewing of the cap.

There was an "awsome" rechargeable Bakelite pocket flashlight I got from my grandfather. It had US-style AC blades that plugged directly into the wall socket, and a dust cap to protect them when not plugged in. It felt really James Bond. It was years later that I came up to speed on the charging and lifetime limitations of Ni-Cd.

Dr.K said:

Monsters under my bed

Click to expand...

Me too. I don't see them anymore.

when i found this forum!

I don't know actually, but I've been fascinated of lights and lighting as long as I can remember. When I was a little boy, I used to buy new lights from time to time although I couldn't find any good reason to do so. And modding is also something that has "always" been there: I had some plastic 2C or 2d torch which I really liked. But the switch was crappy and it caused the torch to flicker. So I took a tumbler switch and soldered it parallel with the original switch and behold: no more flickering!

Then became the time for Maglites, but I was never really happy with them: Minimags crappy switching system caused the light to flicker, 4D sucked batteries faster than tax authority and Solitaire was merely a joke.

It was Led Lensers "Photonpump V8" key ring that really caught my attention about led lights and rest is history.. Now I have several led torches that outshines everything that I had earlier and there still seems to be that old "I have to get that torch although there isn't really good reason to buy it" mentality around..

Being part of the scouts. My mother bought me a yellow 2C plastic flashlight that I treasured. The ability to see outside at night has always fascinated me, and lead to smaller or more powerful flashlights.

Mom bought me a Lumilite brand 2AA incan one year at Christmas time when I was maybe 8 years old. After that I lusted after bigger and bigger ones... 2C, 2D... and it just grew.
I needed more light. I needed a light that went further!
In my teens I purchased myself maglites. The ultimate 6D Mag with halogen bulb. I found myself Princeton Tec's awesome Halogens and went into Dive Lights for a bit. I joined Law Enforcement Explorers, got access to the LEO supply store and found my first Surefire. It just kept going. And eventually I stumbled upon Quickbeam's flashlight review site, which led me to CPF around this time last year.
But if there's anyone to blame... it's my mother!

I was talking to my older sister the other day. I told her about our possible Midwest gathering, and after cracking up for a while, she told me she wasn't surprised. She told me that when she took me to the circus down at the old Convention Center in Cleveland (Ringling Bros) I didn't watch the show. I spent the night turned around in my seat watching the spotlights!

This place.

This place...uuhhh...and monsters in my closet!

I've always loved a good flashlight. I bought my 6D MANY years ago and was the flashlight master at the campfires. I bought a 2D for work. It survived a 70+ foot drop from a bridge crane. When wifey and I were at Home Depot and would walk past the flashlight section she'd say "C'mon. Keeeep walkin' ". I had read in an article about that Chrysler Tomakawk motorcycle that it used 10W LEDs. So I started searching around the internet and found this place. It's like I have returned to the mother ship.

Bad lights, good lights. In that order.

what got me started being a light lover?
Being a light Hater, i hated the condition and funtional capacity of EVERY light i ever had or owned. i could really care less what any of them had looked like, but when you NEEDED them badly they never functioned, or functioned long, or well enough.
dead batteries, leaking batteries, popped bulbs (not instaflashed bad switches, poor beams, doughnut holes, Dying in the Middle of whatever you were doing, all that stuff. that of course was years ago.
NOW every light works whenever you need it, for as long as you could need it.

it all happened long ago in a far off land when i researched Putting Leds into a Flashlight, and Bam found myself here, then i realised that there are lights , and there is a LIFETIME of lights and science behind it all that would take a person a whole lifetime to comprehend, only to realise how little they then knew. (the more you know, the more you realise how little you know).

Ignorance, Mag lights, and 2$ lights, might not work, but its still bliss

I think what got me started was that little 1AA light that I used to read under the bed covers when I was a kid. I accumulated quite a bunch of cheap incands. before finding CPF and going LED.

Geoff

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