Yet another flashlight thread.

I Robert I said:
Nah, I usually keep my apartment completely dark 95% of the time anyways. I just like em is all. Just like some people like collecting other stuff. It's amazing how hard people find it to understand this hobby. RC people and such never meet this type of "resistance" :p

It's just such a mundane object. An RC car can be raced and you can run over shit. You can compete with it and you can just play with it.

A flashlight is on and off. High and low. It just makes light. They have no historical, emotional or collector value. It'd be different if they were vintage or all military or something other than just being REALLY bright. That's where it is hard to understand.
 
Spange Monkee said:
It's just such a mundane object. An RC car can be raced and you can run over shit. You can compete with it and you can just play with it.

A flashlight is on and off. High and low. It just makes light. They have no historical, emotional or collector value. It'd be different if they were vintage or all military or something other than just being REALLY bright. That's where it is hard to understand.
Eye of the beholder I guess.

Maybe I should point out that my tiny little collection doesn't really show the wide spectrum of lights that are collected by people involved in this hobby. I tend to go for tiny and powerfull. There are other people that try to restore and play with things like the hooge old military spotlights from WWII and such. You know the kind with a diesel powered powerplant on wheels to power them. This isn't quite what I was thinking of but I was too lazy to find the threads, pretty close though:
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=130083

We (by "we" I mean those of us involved in the hobby) also have a lot of people that machine their own lights or produce accessories. We have people working with "exotic" materials such as titanium, different types of alloys, hell there's even a production light right now in pure silver. Besides creating bodies we have a couple people creating custom reflectors.

There's people who specialise in the electronics behind it all. We have several people producing and selling programmable circuits for flashlights for example. There's a few manufacturers that are producing new types of batteries aswell.

And no emotional or collectors value? Now there's something you are waaaay wrong about. There are certainly lights with collectors value. A year or two ago a company called Arc went bankrupt, within a few days of that happening the lights they produces trippled or quadrupled in value. There was a buying frensy for a short period there where people would pay way more than the lights were worth, just to get their hands on them.
I've seen special custom lights change owners several times. Their value has only gone up and they are usually gone within hours after being posted for sale.

They don't do anything? Well, do stamps do anything? How about dead bugs or butterflies? Some people like to collect old CPUs, they don't do much either. Rocks? Exciting they are, for some. Still, these types of collections are more or less accepted as normal hobbies. Collecting flashlights however, that's a whole different story apparently.

I don't know how (or even if) I can make people understand this :) I've never been good at argumenting so maybe that's why I'm failing :lol:
 
I think it's neat anyway.

Everyone needs a hobby. Knives are pretty much useless doesnt make them any less fun to fingerfuck.