Let there be lights

I have several "passions" in my life. I love knives, guns, cars, motorcycles, gadgets, music, and the list never ends. One of entries on the list is a bright idea: flashlights.

I've kept flashlights on hand for decades now. I keep a nice, big, powerful D cell Maglite with 3 watt LED conversion in the house for the super-duty jobs. It is bright as hell and runs for forever. LED bulbs run on a few flea-power, versus the sucking drain of a conventional bulb, even the Xenon type. Suffice it to say, I much prefer the LED type of light whenever I can get it. I also keep smaller LED lights in the glove box of vehicles, saddlebags of bikes, inside toolboxes, in an office desk drawer, on the nightstand, etc. I keep em anywhere you might need your hand on a light in the event the power goes buh-bye, or if an uninvited guest comes into your home in the wee hours and needs to have his corneas seared out of his head while you snuff out his light, if you will.

Nebo Redline.

Most of the crew I work with keep at least one flashlight of some type in the tool bag. A few months back, one of the guys pulled out this really interesting looking silver colored light, and stuck it to the side of a refrigerator with it turned on, and it stayed put. I had to get a good look at this little jewel. It was a Nebo Redline. It features an adjustable flood to spot beam, high and low beams, strobe, and SOS modes, magnetic base, glow in the dark multi-function switch, and spits out a blinding 220 lumens of the whitest light this white boy has ever witnessed. The body tube is aluminum, tough, and weather resistant. He then let me fidget with it for a few, and told me he got a good deal on it at a local shop. These can be found for around $20-$25 average. I had to have one. So, I grabbed one meself, and it became my go-to light for my work tool bag. That is, up until the end of August this year, when it fell down into a wall I was working on with a coworker. The Nebo was mounted to an iron beam above the ceiling grid, and just slid down due to the huge dust collection on the beam, and "thunk" down the wall it went, beyond reach. I am still just gutted over the loss, like the loss of a pet. I haven't gotten a new one yet, but I will. Oh yes, I will.

GSX 235 lumen.

A few months before the Nebo was introduced to me, right after Christmas, I had picked up a light to put on the nightstand at the local Gander Mountain. It was a GSX 235 lumen flashlight. It's bright like the Nebo, but doesn't have an adjustable beam. What it does have is high and low beams, strobe, and sets of red, blue, and green lower power LEDs. This allows you to use the colored lights, rather than the white bulb, for specialized vision at night. The green is great for reading maps in the dark, the blue is used to find substances such as blood or other fluids for tracking game or some such, and the red is great to preserve your own natural night vision. Using red lights to illuminate your surroundings does not cause the "blindness" after the light is turned off that other colors do, especially white. Pretty handy. The body is pretty tough aluminum and weather resistant. The store had it on sale for next to nothing back then, so I snapped it up, not realizing how bad ass it would actually be. They have since marked the light up to a whopping $70. Glad I got mine early.

Nebo and GSX.

If you are looking for small, but powerful LED flashlights that are great tools that should provide years of use and get good battery mileage, you might want to check out lights like the ones featured here. I'll admit, I'm very, very partial and biased towards the Nebo Redline. It is my all-time favorite flashlight I've owned, and I've had a fair few. It is just the right size and weight, runs on 3 AAA batteries for a long time, has all the bells you need, and no whistles you don't, and the magnetic base is just so handy...the thing just fits the bill for any job you toss at it. Anyway, I hope I've helped to shed some light on the subject for you. Ha. Ha. Ha.

-Owen