I’m a new member here and excited to see and learn the modifications done to the Maglite flashlights.
My fascination with lights started when I was about nine years old. I was given a 2AA-battery incandescent bulb flashlight in a rectangular plastic case. It was an Eveready flashlight and it was my first flashlight that got me hooked to the bright beam of light.
Time passed, got new flashlights and I was happy with my Minimags and 3D Maglites.
Internet came in and along with it websites and the beginning of forums. Internet introduced me to Surefire flashlights and lithium battery. Suddenly, the definition of bright light changed. I had the Streamlight, Underwater Kinetics, SF-3P and SF-12ZM. But their brightness was only for a short period of time. Batteries were expensive and quickly drained by those current hungry lights.
Then, LED lights came along. The early led flashlights were no competition to the incandescent fire dragons. The hook was… they don’t get broken when you drop them and shines longer than incandescent. I got my Photon lights, Lightwave 2000 and another flashlight with seven leds in it that used 3C batteries.
After that, different breeds of LED arrived. They were brighter and used lithium batteries. People are now talking of volts, amperes, watts, lumens when before this LED invasion it was just size and number of batteries. Now, I have to keep up with the different sizes and types of batteries. Battery chargers got into the picture too. OMG! I had an assortment of AA and AAA battery chargers… the Maha, Rayovac, Duracell, etc.
I am now using 14500 and 18650 lithium batteries for my Cree XML-T6 flashlights. I got my Pila IBC and Cottonpicker chargers. Although those batteries also come with bigger risk compared to alkaline batteries, I try to follow the safety precautions when charging Li-Ion batteries. I hope those chargers are as good as claimed and prevent burning the house down.
Sometimes my wife and I would got out of the house at night to shine different flashlights to a tree and enjoy looking at the beam of lights. We were like two children playing in the night.
I hope I didn’t take too much of your time reading this. I’m glad I found this forum and I know I’m in good company of people fascinated with the beam of light.