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
Fandyfire S3 !
I only bought it to feel what a mcgismo would be like.
Zombie thread! Okay, so more than five years later, my previous entry in this thread still stands:
Hahaha!
Yeah, that one totally sucks…
I’ll add my magic to this glorious necro:
- the “regular” M@glites as far back as 2014. I mean seriously, in stock form they are pure cringe. You pay a bunch for a light with poor waterproofing (the competition has IPX-7 at least on their regular sale models), garbage plastic lens (no kidding, I swapped mine for a circular PET cutout from a soda bottle and it works better), HORRIBLE beam (because they can’t be arsed into designing a parabolic reflector, apparently). They feel really good in the hand, yes, but the good side ends there.
And no, the “MURRIKA” thing that M@glite fanboys preach up and down doesn’t do it for me, because I’m a) not some gullible fanatical patriot that doesn’t know most of the components are Chinese in origin, and b) not a yank to begin with. Worst of all, the 2AA Mini’s stock tail spring crushed the tail ends of my Eneloops. Gidouttahere with that &$#+!
- Fenix E11. Just plain poor design for an EDC light: Low mode is much too high, the optics it uses concentrates the beam far too much for indoors use (too much throw, not enough flood, and glare galore), and the switch is about as pleasant as removing a tyre from its rim barehanded (don’t try this at home). In fact, this light is exactly why I was wary of the 1xAA format and a Thrunite T10 - thankfully that little one taught me that 1xAA lights can be pleasant to operate and use even if your hands are large.
- some Cheapo POS claiming 78k lumens feeding on 18650s or 3xAAA carriers that I bought back in 2010/11, when I didn’t even know flashlight forums existed or what an 18650 was. After hearing of one of our fellows who had a battery in a C8 vent inside his car and burning it down, I couldn’t put the battery fast enough in the recycling bin - the light itself, in its rusted-contact and unpleasant-to-hold glory, I got so horribly disgusted by that I threw it out the window of my car into an entirely uninhabited area. I wouldn’t subject even trash diggers to think themselves lucky they have it. :rage:
Runners-up are a Thrunite Archer 2A v2 in NW that I sent back to Thrunite’s factory 3 or 4 times (lovely beam and good runtime, actually was my thrower for a while, but unreliable enough to make me give up on it), and an Olight S30 that on paper should be featured on the list because it doesn’t go farther than medium mode without flickering like a bad CFL and shining the low battery LED on the side switch, but I’m not bothered by it - I just stuck a low-cap battery in it and use its Moonlight and Low modes for utility. They’re not listed because these are bad individual samples, not bad models as a whole.