My first LED light (other than those 9LED jobbies) was a streamlight polytac followed almost instantly (as in less that a week) by a quark pro 2AA and an (orignal run) Pink preon P1 for the wife.
Then within a few months of getting them I purchased an original RGBW quark for $55 off CPF, played with it a little, put it in its box and left it till about this time last year when I sold it on eBay (paired with an now very rare 18650 quark body) for ~$175!
To this day that’s the best mark-up I’ve made on any light and it was totally stock.
Hahaha. Yeah, I did the 12v solitaire mod too but split the battery into two for less stress to the LED. :P. My first Mag 2D mod was a breadboard with 14, 5mm nichias and a 350mA micropuck. 8)
Ultrafire B1 around 2006-2007. Arrived with unscrewed reflector, ugly beam….took me like 5 years to find out something was just unscrewed…that were the early stages of my flashaholism!
But then the tiny Luxeon was inefficient, horrible green tint, inefficient driver…
This light blew me away when I got it. Still have it and it’s working fine. Trying to find out what else was out there lead me to BLF. Lights I have now are much better but my pocket is also a lot lighter
In the early 90’s - probably around 1991, I saw a 2000 mcd red LED advertised somewhere. I bought one and wired it in series with a current limiting resistor along with a 4xAA battery holder. I was a grad student at the time studying spectroscopy. So after playing with it for a while, I sanded the lens front flat and polished it. I turned it into a pretty good point source that I used to align my optics.
newbie here, found BLF looking for a light to use for mountain biking. But group buys has put me on the wrong path and so far I’ve received 2 SK68 clones (the one mode has a nice smooth beam, the 3-mode’s beam is not so smooth), waiting for the 2 CQG S1 “clones” to arrive, and committed to ordering 2 BLF Eagle Eye X6s.
The Opus 3100 showed up last night. Nice box, have no use for it til the X6s show up and I guess I’d need to find some batteries too.
INOVA X-5
It’s the first model twisty.
I think I’ve had it for about 20 years.
$40 at Fry’s and not very bright but it still works fine, uses 2 CR 123 batteries.
My dad saw it and I had to buy him one but he had the newer model with the tail switch.
(so I had to buy myself the newer model too)
Although these sound great on the surface, I have a lot of complaints. When I turn a light on, I want it ON. I don’t want to have to wait 5-10 minutes for it to slowly decide to light up. When one burns out, I don’t want to have to go to a bunch of extra effort to have to recycle it at some special place. And worst yet, I’ve had one of those expensive LED bulbs burn out in just a few weeks! We have energy efficient bulbs all through our house, and we’re constantly having to replace them. I’m all for saving energy, but I want better options before they ban the inexpensive option that works.
