Let us not forget the infamous Maglight Solitaire ...
My C3 also needed some serious beating, disassembly and modding to R5 to get it even going somewhat rather reliably without flickering...
Price no1 still goes to:
Sabrewolf modded 123-mini-EDC (SST-90)
Paid too much (lord knows why) for it, waited some months, got it, tested, tested later again -> broken. Send it back, wait for months again.
It was more than half a year after sending money when I finally got it in my hand, working.
The light that's better at battery storage than illumination !
It spawned the famous quote: "I've seen matches burn brighter, and longer !"
FryRay 3800. FryRay 818. Oh wait. That's two...
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.
The Small Sun ...whyman...??
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.
truly foul...
(pun intended)
The light I own that is not worth picking up the the fauxton....
But that makes them AWSOME (and worth buying another 10...) !!! ;)
Happy new year!
Got a "emergency charger "/ 2aa,USB with flashlight.Weakest beam I have seen.
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.
Tank 007 Blackcat AAA
Warsun 1AA
Generic torpedo style AA Flashlight.
All the Teralux flashlights i bought.
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:
The pic is not my light, just for reference…
Now that would be a picture worth seeing…………. :+1:
Pretty much any 3×AAA light, but especially those notorious multi-LED tubelights and/or showerhead lights.
There’s a special circle of Hell for whoever came up with those…
Clever design, but when you get sick of the anæmic output from dying cells and replace them, the ones you tossed out probably still have half or more of useful energy inside. And they’re impressive for all of about 2min of use until the brightness starts its long slide downhill.
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Also, those big honkin’ “lantern” type flashlights with typically 3 Angry Blue™ LEDs, that take those lantern batteries (6V rectangular bricks with 2 springs on top). How in B’harni’s Dark Name amyone could run down one of those with 3 stinking sub-watt LEDs… is absolutely beyond me.
Then again, those batteries don’t take 4 cylindrical A cells, but probably a stack of 4 AAAAs gutted from 9V batteries, considering how featherweight they happen to be. It’s a racket…
Aha, these…
Die! Die! Die! Die! Die!
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Any cheap-ass light sold on Amazon or Fleabay or anywhere else, that uses plastic reflectors, undersized LB LEDs, etc., and is otherwise a flat-out fraud.
Express ticket to Hell for laughable claims such as 2000lm from a LB emitter.
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Items like P60 drop-ins rated (or claimed to be) 3V-18V when in fact they’ve just got a single resistor limiting current.
My worst was a 501B that arrived ‘pre-zapped’ from one of our big name Chinese suppliers - I could smell the burnt electronics when I opened the package!
The upside was that it gave me the nudge I needed to start modding, so it still worked out well in the end.
……but yes, I’ll also admit to having a shoe box full of those Dollar Store trash lights. I keep thinking I might some day salvage a switch or a lens, but I never do.
Wow, old thread. Okay, I’ll add any of the twist-interface Maglite zoomies. They have bad beam profiles, very poor heatsink ability (though their poor output doesn’t really need it), and the switches often flicker. Oh, and the LED tints are crap too. Basically, all Mags made after the year 2000.
Astrolux M01 and M02 are good contestants too…
They’re not even cheap…
I had a couple of Arc AAAs that got iffy, and I sent them back in (they come with a lifetime warranty).
They came back working fine. Dunno what was fixed but they’ve been reliable lights for years now.
I have red, orange, aqua/green, blues, white, two kinds of UV, and ‘snow white’ — they’re historical artifacts.
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On my drop list: tin-foil flashlights something-Eagle brand, AA and 18650, not worth a dollar and change
