Cheap SK68 got me into LED flashlights late 2013.
i am noticing a trend,
a lot of our “first crushes” as teens and young adults? was a 2xAA MAGlite, lol…
True, but at the time there was also about zero competition.
I got my first flashlight from my dad it looked kinda like this one:
At the time it was awesome and it was army so as a little kid I loved it.
Had 3 different RGB slides build in, always took it with me camping.
Ran on 2 D cells and had an extra bulb inside 
Kinda forgot all about flashlights untill later in life.
First one I bought was a 4 D cell maglite with a led.
Was happy with it but still kinda “Meh”
Then years later I got a skyray king and was blown away by the leap of brightness.
I can only imagine what we will use in 10 years time.
Mag-Lights were frequent Christmas gifts all around the USA for all of the 90’s .
I remember the commercials. I had a few . It was the most people would spend or could afford on a Flashlight.
I was looking for lights for night bike riding.
The NiCad-incandescent stuff was poor in every respect.
Somehow I discovered the Chinese 4x18650 bike lights for under $30.
Then i started looking for LED flashlights - the rest is history.
wle
I think I’ve always been fascinated by shiny and bright things. I can remember using solid core telephone wires to make flashlights out of incandescent bulbs and carbon cell batteries. If I was lucky enough to find a 9+ volt bulb and battery, didn’t even need the wire, just connect the base and side of the bulb to the two terminals. Ah, those were the days…
If I were to recall a specific light that had the most significance, Waay back in the day, when electricity was first invented (okay, 40+ years ago), my dad bought me one of these:
It’s a Sanyo Cadnica flashlight with built-in NiCad batteries and a 120v charging port. Mine wasn’t quite this big and the body was black.
Of course before that, there were tons of cheap Ray-o-vac flashlights with the shiny chrome bodies and red plastic heads and plastic slider switch. They came in a wide variety of battery choices. Some had magnets, some didn’t.
One of my uncles was in the National Guard. I remember ogling his military issue right angled flashlight as a little kid.
I had one of those duracells to CRX, totally forgot until your picture……………at the time i thought it was the dogs doodars!
My start was from a young age, camping with parents, eveready types, C and D cell alki leaks. Then from around 16 when i did my 1st apprenticeship(HGV mec) a Maglite run on D cells off the snap on man. At around £40 back in 1991(almost a weeks wage bacj then!!!), it was possibly one of the best “torches” available at the time in the UK. From there, as you do on holidays to the Lake district, those hiking type shops with all the swiss army knives and different maglite flavours. LED lenser lights……………….it continued. Every time i went away, i would always slip in one of those shops and purchase a new flashlight.
Skip forward, working as an engineer, flashlights become an important tool on my daily duties. Varies searches over the years brought me to CPF and BLF, signing up and the flashlight family has grown. I remember back to 2013 buying the nitecore p15 as my 1st more expensive light. Then when i clocked on to the tiny monster range……………….that was it. The bug had bit and bit quite hard! My 1st big purchase at £120 on a TM15 . I remember thinking what the beep am i doing here, i am crazy(i now know i am). Cool white was……………cool, now its not so much. 4000k 5000k , hi cri, triples, quads, different drivers and custom lights have all become part of the family. Lights in the past i always liked and wanted but thought no way, have to be crazy…………………guess i have become crazy. Cool whites are at a minimum, crazy outputs i like and enjoy but its no longer the B all and end all.
Little crazy fact,I actually use a flashlight more in the day than i do at night………….
I am not as bad as my little one, he has well over 30 lights right now, and only 7……………god help him when he gets to my age :person_facepalming:
Man… I think I was a hopeless flashaholic even before the times that I can remember I do distinctly remember that I made my parents buy me several of those tin-bodied incans fed by 2 AA’s, and because zinc-carbon was the word of the world back in the 90s, they’d barely last a week because of leaks. I didn’t mind, I played with them even if they couldn’t light up, the youngster that I was… but the top of the top for me was my police uncle’s 2D Mag-Lite, all sleek and black and with a beam that adjusts, with a lamp in the tailcap, enough to make an unwitting flashaholic pup drool out the side of his mouth 
That and the old military angle-head kept by my closest friend’s father, a retired lieutenant in the Army, with the swappable colored lenses and everything. (which reminds me I still don’t have an angle-head)
It also helped that starting on video games, where the flashlight is a common and useful item, brought their utility to my attention.
(side note: anyone looking for a piece of fiction where you can compare beam tints, look no further than Unreal)
The first torch of my own of any note was a Great-Lite, a M@g knockoff; I know to this very day that I have 2 or 3 spare bulbs for it somewhere in the house. Then, around 2004, LED’s started popping up and I put together the money to buy one of those stocky 3AAA angry blue 5mm lights, and thought the world of it because it wouldn’t dim as fast as an incan (guess that orientated my current taste for long runtimes, batteries were expensive for a preteen to get). Then came those plastic lights with the retractable wall plugs and a 2-stage sliding switch (one click and half of the LEDs light up, another click goes full power); I stayed a long time with those, especially a shorty green one with four LEDs and an actually pretty decent cool white tint, that rode in my cell phone pocket for the entirety of high school, even after one emitter dimmed and the other went out completely. I gave away a number of those as well, when I felt people needed it
Really, I stayed in the “lights with wall plugs” fad for a very very long time even if they were unreliable and went bad after a month or two, because they were the best I could reach - by this point, I knew of Surefire, Streamlight and a bit more about Mag-Lite than that they produced the 2D model. I even joined an Orkut (who remembers that one? lol) community about tactical flashlights, but never participated once I was replied to that the meager budget I had didn’t even come close to buying a “true” tac light.
By this point it was 2013 and I’d bought a few Cheapo zoomies (one AA-sized that rode in my pocket for a number of months like the stocky 4-LED one did years before), but wasn’t too impressed - to me, a 78.000 lumen light was not especially bright but I just thought 1 lumen wasn’t much. Change came when I found this article here on an idle search, which led to this article where I learned of the name Nitecore, which led me to Youtube, and to Chris Tanner’s review of the Fenix PD35 (which I’m still ashamed to this day not having watched first to know 18650s are rechargeable :person_facepalming: Dummy).
Either way, the name Fenix stuck, and I looked at MercadoLivre (eBay’s national branch) and found myself a Fenix E01. That was literally the first good flashlight I ever owned. From there I looked for better prices, and after a botched purchase of a Klarus P2A I found out about the Thrunite TN12 2014 (also by Chris Tanner, as he compared the PD35 to it), and the rest is a snowball of full-blown flashaholism where I discovered selfbuilt, leading me to Candlepowerforums and then to this forum, which I lurked on for over a year before making my first post - now I’m yapping on at about 500 spots of natter, with six different brands of quality lights in my ownership over 3 years 
Wow, look at this wall of memories making me look like a creaky ancient… would you guys believe I’m just four days short of being 26 years old? 
In time: Thomas Brezina’s The Mummy-Car was the one piece of my youth that drilled into my head that it’s not good enough to carry one single flashlight :nerd_face:
@all: Lots of nice stories and memories!
I’m almost ashamed to admit i never did care that much about flashlights until 3 1/2 years ago. As a kid (60s - 70s) and even as an adult i think the only flashlights that where around where the boxy flat 4.5V military style and some plastic 2/3D. Not much to be impressed with and i never really needed one - or so i think. I actually enjoy being out in the dark, relying on night vision… go figure.
However, i’ve always been fond of gadgets. Especially the kind that has a button (or more) that does something cool.
I picked up the flashlight addiction as a side effect of getting into electronic cigarettes in 2013. I had all those new Li-Ion cells and i was also new at shopping on FT… and one day i looked in the flashlight section. That was it.
I started with some cheap AA SK68 clone (i did not know that at the time) and was blown away. Then i slowly went up the ladder with ‘better’ and more expensive lights… and batteries… and chargers - well, you know what i mean. 
I saw a sky beam and wanted one for myself 
As a kid I always liked flashlights… started off on cheap old school various D battery lights, 2 AA boy scout light, etc… begged for and got a rechargeable light kind of like a dustbuster vacuum but an actual flashlight for x-mas when I was maybe 10 or so… lol.
As I got older, always had multiple various Maglites, all sizes… AA edc lights and D lights for the truck and nightstand.
When LED lights got popular I would always get the latest greatest light from home depot or similar store…
Then I got a SK68… Bamm! It took off from there… Probably have at least 30 lights now… low to high end 18650’s etc. etc.
Wife just kind of rolls her eyes when a new package comes in from Gearbest or Amazon, but doesn’t grumble because it’s way cheaper that collecting guns which I used to do like a mad man before I ran out of room in the gun safes… lol.
Plus no one grumbles when the power goes out, or we are out unexpectedly past dark!
What got me into flashlights as a hobby was finding an 18650 light on sale (thanks to slickdeals.net), being blown away by how powerful flashlights had become since I got my D-cell Maglite, and at that point, I was hooked.
Most places I have lived have had pretty poor architectural lighting, so I had lots of uses for lights that I could stick all around the house.
Always had ’em when I was a kid, including the big gray donk from Rat Shack that occasionally came free with a coupon in the Sunday papers. (Anyone remember Kornfeld’s “flyer-side chats” in the RS flyers? )
Loooved penlights, just like doctors had for peering into peoples’ orifices. Ah, the wonders of the prefocussed 222 bulb…
When LED-based keychain lights came out, I was in Hog Heaven. LEDs built into housekey overmolds that light up the lock when you squeeze the sides of the key. Fish-shaped keychain lights. All kinds of LED lights powered by coin cells. They were my new toys. If fish-lights came in green, blue, red, and yellow, I’d have to get one of each color.
Minimags were next. Loved the adjustability, but even back then hated the Doughnut Hole Of Death when spread out into a flood beam. Kept it focussed in spot mode when I’d use it. But they were solid. No crappy plastic tube with a crappy switch, but Real Metal™. Another rapture into Hog Heaven…
Then… nothing. No new developments. Boredom. Keychain lights fell out of favor. No more seeing racks of them on counters at autoparts stores, nothing. Mags? Ho-hum. The “new” Solitaire? <yawn>
Don’t recall what possessed me to look, but I did check out UV lights online, saw different types of UV lights (keychain types, multi-LED types, and bigger donks like the ’501), and once I sniffed out ’501s, I wanted some in UV, and some more in VIS.
From there, it was all downhill… Feel like I singlehandedly bought Bezos his new pool, with all the bux that I filtered through Amazon. And now I’m doing my part to support the Chinese economy.
As a kid I always liked flashlights… started off on cheap old school various D battery lights, 2 AA boy scout light, etc… begged for and got a rechargeable light kind of like a dustbuster vacuum but an actual flashlight for x-mas when I was maybe 10 or so… lol.
Btw… Now I’m feeling all nostalgic, does any one remember these lights? Came with a rechargeable light, charging station, and totally looked like a dust buster vacuum, tan in color I think? This was like thirty or so years ago, so I kind of forget…
Never owned one, but somehow your description called up a long-forgotten mental image. I must have seen one mounted in someone’s garage as a kid.
I believe you’re referring to Black & Decker’s “Spotliter.” The ad is dated 1982.
I found it by searching Google Images for “rechargeable black decker flashlight” and sifting through the more modern variants.
It started when i found a foursevens preon 2 aaa when i was playing paintball.
You lucky sonuvagun
Since so many of you guys are digging into the deep shadows of the mind to find flashlight origins, I’ll consider WHY I’ve always liked lights, camera’s, and action.
My Aunt never had kids, had a good paying job, and considered us (her sisters kids) as her own. We got gadgets and tech stuff, miniaturized things, from places outside of our little town. My Aunt would travel the several hours to Houston and shop in exotic places, buying us Christmas gifts from these places beyond our imagination. She paid attention, I was into the tech stuff, the gadgets and reveled in the miniature. So I realize upon this pondering that it was actually my Aunt that started me on this trail.
And yes, I had pen lights, RayOVac’s, Duracells, anything that looked cool I had to have. But it wasn’t until years later, with MagLights securely in my possesion since their inception, that things took a different turn. As an adult with children, I lost my 17 yr old. This pushed me to delve into my love of photography and actually go into business. Which of course meant I needed light. And when I saw JayRob advertising a chopped D Mag with 1000 lumens over at CPF, well, I dropped the coin. (Like $165! Yikes!) That was my first real venture into LED’s. While still at CPF, I found Fred by accident. I had a large piece of Titanium (yes, been a TiFreak for years) that I couldn’t use for anything because it was several inches in diameter. I was told Photon Fanatic might be able to use it, so I contacted him and sent him the piece. Made the mistake of browsing his site. And became obsessed with owning a true Photon Fanatic Custom in miniature. I designed a light (design being a comparatively loose term) based on a Leupold rifle scope and Fred made it for me with surgical grade titanium I had for some 13 years. Thus the Texas Poker was born. (My Avatar, a neck light with an 10440 cell)
When I got to BLF I discovered the HD2010. Mine didn’t work out of the box, needed tinkering with. And more tinkering, and improvements, and so I learned to mod a light. Then Justin (Old-Lumens) issued the first Scratch Built Challenge and the rest is history! I became an addict to the mod.
And so, the GDB50BMG came to life. (Gunner’s Dress Blues .50 Browning Machine Gun) I actually took a live .50 caliber machine gun round apart and made an 800 lumen flashlight out of it for the Challenge. Back in June of 2013…
Been building em ever since.
I have many hobbies which involve tinkering with things (tractors, old engines) as well as hobbies involving electronics (Amateur Extra licensed HAM operator), so working on lights fits well with my other interests. I grew up in Cub/Boy Scouts so we always had different lights about. My Father was involved with security in the early to mid 80’s and I can remember him having a big rechargeable Mag Lite that I liked to play with (when he wasn’t looking). But my interests with modding and building lights started mainly after finding this site. I work with a BLF member who introduced me to high power custom LED lights as well as this site.