The Skyray S-A1 is the first light that comes to my mind. Strange pick, I know. I got it because my Skyray S-R5 was my most used light at the time and everybody on the DX forums seemed to like them. One of the people at DX who I was in regular contact with, gave me a heads up that the new batch they were about to get wasn't going to be as good, so I ordered three.
Not a good move, as I suspect all three actually came from the new batch. None of those ever actually worked right: fully charged 14500s, which is what I use almost exclusively in my EDC lights, would fry the step up converter and/or driver. Reliability was crap. I'd turn it off after having used it for a few seconds and it would refuse to turn back on. And since I never liked it to begin with, I never bothered to actually spend time to try and fix it. At the same time, those lights simply refused to die. One time, we dropped a S-A1 onto concrete from a helicopter and it turned on no problem. But it would refuse to turn on or switch modes or quit on me with no provocation whatsoever.
Sipik SK78 and the X2000 flood-to-throw. Just cheaply made POS.
The SK78 has two metal screws holding the tailcap switch in and are only screwed in half-way and that’s as far as they will screw it. As someone else mentioned for another light…gravity will activate the zoom.
A 14500 burned the emitter out on arrival. The X2000 is just ugly, cheaply made and quite working after a mild bump.
The Akoray K-109 non-programmable version is dim in comparison to the programmable version and is less well built as well.
Non of them work at this point although I’ve helped some of them get to that state.
I think the worst I've ever bought was a Home Depot $1 single AA special that I bought around this time last year as stocking stuffers for the kids. Ended up being the worse money I ever spent on lights.
Without doubt my trustfire xp-ef23. I got it for my wife and she maybe used it two times for a few seconds each time. The light just up and quit working for some reason.
It was like $15 as well so it wasn’t that cheap. I thought it was the led but I could get it to flash once in a while when pressing the switch so the led was good. I tried the paper clip trick but no joy.
I have no idea what is wrong with it but it is not just a parts light I guess. I need to group my lights that I don’t want or don’t work and sell them all in one lot to someone how liked working on them. I have like 5 lights that don’t work or I don’t like that I need to find another home for.
This one, so much. A paper thin aluminium tube holding the lens over a generic 5mm LED, surrounding a flimsy plastic body. The battery tube is something like 13mm so there's another flimsy spacer to hold the battery in. Entire tailcap is plastic.
Other terrible lights include anything with a low quality 3xAAA carrier, the MXDL '3W' twisty with a floating plastic pill. Even 10 pack keychain LEDs are better than these ones.
Ditto. Got mine for 8 bucks on ebay. 25-30 lumens, if that. Always dim and worthless, no matter what batteries used. Cheap materials. Zoomer slides in and out now. Utterly worthless...unless you're trapped in a cave or something!
In my experience, its a c2 clone bought off eBay. That POS had a plastic reflector, painted finish, really bad threads and bad overall machining. Garbage.
it's usually not good to try to clone a 90$ light with a 6$ light ..only a real idiot would buy 3 to get the price down from 8 to only 7$ at DX....Worst 20$ spent on lights ever .
the reason it's sitting on grass is ....it's about to lay an egg.
At least it doesn't claim to be a "tactical police flashlight" and totally not achieve any of the suggested claims of being tactical, police and a flashlight. still says battery charger on the casing, as far as can be seen in the picture.
These hand crank turds from Costco. I bought them in a 2 or a 3 pack, they never really worked all that well. Crank the suckers for 5-6 minutes for a few minutes of light. The internal gears wear out within a month. None of them made it through the first power outage of the storm season. http://67-20-93-49.unifiedlayer.com/flashlightreviews/reviews/durapro_crank.htm
Second nomination goes to the older Duracell Costco lights, the ones with the orange e-switch with really bad parasitic drain… as if 3AAA battery changes weren’t enough of a pain.
I bought this one too hoping it would have a voltage booster to make the light brighter if the batteries go low. I was disappointed. Once the batteries go even a little low the LED light is worthless. And the USB port doesn’t put out 5vdc either, even with new batteries, my USB doctor doesn’t even light up.
For me it was the Arc AAA first gen. The (expeletive) light never worked when I needed it!!! No matter how clean the treads were (I even polished them to a mirror shine!) I re-soldered the center positive contact blob, replaced and even took out the foam reverse polarity protection, it worked only when it felt like it.
Ended up flat as a pancake by a heavy sledgehammer…!!!
Damn!! I still grin by the satisfaction I got from it…!!! :smiling_imp: