I used to do light reviews, wasn’t worth the time anymore.
Now i just do impressions since i “test” a light for my personal uses.
A good review takes one or more full working days, even without screwdriver. Just saying.
I’m curious: What do you expect from a documentation about a teardown? While it’s interesting on its own, and may give insights about how the light could work, it tells you nothing about how the light is doing in reality.
That’s what counts :+1: .
Hello Forsyth P. Jones and Welcome to BLF 
I missed your intro. Good to see some CPF members here contributing ideas. 
You guys are welcome here and I hope you enjoy the free atmosphere.
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BLF is like a big long river thru many countries with many types of fish all swimming around in different directions, some in schools, most individually. So many different interests in the wide variety of lights available. Somewhat organized and disorganized simultaneously enjoying their freedom to move freely and drawn to this river in the Love of lights.
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You might be able to gather enough interest by posting a thread asking for those interested to commit to a ” community funded subforum for tear-down reviews ” and see if enough fish will be attracted. Run the post for a few weeks because members are not always here and will miss seeing it. Good Luck and best wishes for success. 
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Teardown, YES!
Good suggestions, DIY is the sole purpose i`m here. Graphs, runtimes like Unheard said also.
I like your Idea.
This site ain’t broke; don’t fix it. 
This is a very nice analogy. I like it!
i would not do that, destroy a review light.
my review will be about what i can tell without doing that, which i think is enough.
most people cannot tell what is good or bad inside a light anyway.
even if you showed them and explained.
That’s what i was thinking too, very poetic of CNCman, didn’t know he was so talented…And good to hear from ya CNC, hope you didn’t have bad damage from the storm.
I find the system we have is great, i am impressed so many people are willing to put their time and energy into testing and measuring budget lights.
If someone wants to put together and find funding for a parallel review system than thats great too. But i find what we already have more than adequate, though i would love to see reviews from engineers who can tear lights down to the components on the PCB and can analyze drivers and run tests to see if they would pass CE, UL and other certifications.
But this would be major bucks.
BTW automakers and their suppliers do such things, i once worked for one for a short time.
Some of TomE’s teardowns found some interesting things. Lack of thermal grease or poor quality grease. Shelfs that were not thick or flat. These can give us an idea of the QC or lack there of. Also can help the non modder get started showing how to get into their lights. He also searched for the sources of parasitic drain, things like that. Fluff reviews can be nice also just for UI descriptions and stepdown reports. Things of that nature.
long time lurker, IMO a “dark mode” would be a great addition to the website.
This should be first priority imo.
Concerning reviews and teardowns…
I do some reviews, some from lights sent by mfrs, others bought myself. Some I dismantle, others I don’t, specially the ones I am not sure if will be able to put back together without damage.
I don’t like having a pile of junk or unused lights around.
Reviews take a lot of time to do, either doing runtime/Amp draw/ whatever or not.
In the end, either with or without tests or teardowns, either being bought or offered for review, either it is mainstream or underground flashlight, you can ear the sound of crickets…
So the effort put on teardowns and reassemble (to take beamshots later on) sometimes is not worth it in terms of ackowledgement.
Being a hobby, I do what I can and want my lights and I can try to do some stuff when asked about,but that normally implies time and sometimes it is not recognized, appreciated or needed.
I’ve always enjoyed your reviews. Hope I remembered to thank you, if not, thanks.
Unfortunately this does not work with my browser on Android.
tks for the link. I do use dark reader. built-in support would be more stable though. 3rd party extensions sometimes break with browser updates.
[quote=Unheard]
Unquestionably, the reviews on the manufacturer-supplied lights take an enormous amount of work, but is it really that beneficial, especially when multiple reviews of the same light end up repeating the same work?
What do I expect from a teardown? Some idea of how the light works, how well it is built, its modification potential, what kind of parts it uses, etc. For example, I saw a photo of a certain Zebralight driver board, and was able to read the part number from the microprocessor (a particular PIC model). By looking up the specs of that MCU, I could see it had enough memory etc. to be able to run Anduril. So that tells me there is some hope of being able to reflash the Zebralight and turn it into an Anduril light. THAT is information that I find interesting.
Also, look at the driver pics on lygte-info. You can see from how some of them are put together (multiple boards at right angles etc) that it would be amazing for a light with that driver to survive a few drops or vibration. If a light is made like that, the photo is valuable user info.
As for how the light is doing in reality, I think it is enough to say “I got this light, I liked it for X features, and ran into Y issues. Here (url) is the manufacturer’s page about it where you can find many nice pictures, so I won’t bother taking more marketing-style photos of it. Some comparable lights are Z and W and here are a few comparison notes.” And if it’s a technical type of review with a runtime graph, a vibration test would also be great, but I haven’t seen anyone doing these. (Vibration test = put the light on a paint shaker and run it for a while, at freezing and hot temperatures if you really want to be hardcore). Any light calling itself “rugged” or “tactical” should be tested like that by the manufacturer, but I doubt that many budget lights actually are. This is one area where Surefire used to be pretty good.
I’ve been told porting Anduril to a PIC would be a major pita due to the MCU dependant tricks used.
But ok, you have a point.