OT - flashlight close out on Amazon

Yep. I got my wife one similar to that in red.

I picked up a few even cheaper ones for myself but the switches on them are pretty crummy.

Thanks for the tip. I just ordered two of the red on/off/strobe focusable lights to have around. Not that I have a shortage of LED flashlights (five or six I believe) but, given the crappy third-world power distribution system in my area, there is no such thing as too many.

Harbor Freight coupons in most magazines and handouts: free 3 1/2 inch led flashlights. They work great!

The free ones from Harbor Freight are OK for free. They need grease on the threads for the tail cap. The machining is very coarse.

I have a free one in the pocket of my bath robe. So I'm never far from a light. In the military, a pistol is what you use to fight your way to your rifle. My HF free light is what I use to stumble my way to my D cell light.

Yes, the free ones are actually a good value. They come with carbon zinc cells, but they work fine on good quality alkalines.

Wow!

I've had maybe four or five of HF's free or cheap little LED lights. I think that one of them is still workable -- switches failed in all of the rest, sometimes within hours. When you are lucky, you get what you paid for

-- the rest of the time you get HF flashlights.

What is the sound of dividing by zero?

I have had a number of HF flashlights go bad.

Sometimes it's the switch that outright fails.

Sometimes I think it's the switch but it's hard to tell. What the flashlight does is come on at about half brightness. Sometimes If you bang it, it comes on full, sometimes you have to turn it on and off a few times. Sometimes I just throw them out.

I don't know what it sounds like, but in Excel it looks like this:

#DIV/0!

I was born in the shadow of the Great Depression. I'm a pack rat, and I save things like that. Mix and match parts, make one that works.

Been there, tried that. They still go bad.

I'm not putting them down to any great extend. Free is good. If the fail, they fail. No big deal.

That's a real shame. I've got a bunch of the free lights, and have had a couple go bad. The blue ones had run of bad glue, the LED module would come out the end, pushed by the tail cap spring.

The tail cap threads tend to be very rough, I pull them out of the package and put grease on the threads before I do any thing else.

It's like George Burns, interviewed some years back. He was telling about his latest twenty something girl friend. The guy asked if George was worried about heart attacks?

"Naah, if she dies, she dies."

If you all are talking about the same free ones I've gotten from HF my experience is they are almost worthless. The switches fail on virtually every one of them and they are hardly bright enough for anything useful.

Pro- it's free Con - everything else

Retail 6.99 and comes with 90 day warranty.

I've got dozens of 'em. Never had a bad switch. On some of the older versions, if you push it too hard off center, you can make the little button thingie under the rubber twist the cylinder on end. Have to push it out of the metal to straighten it out. Newer versions don't have that problem. Threads seem to be better too.

I've never had a problem with them. Since I have an unlimited supply there's no reason to ever buy new batteries for them.

HF is very good at marketing. Once you're in the store you find all sorts of things that you don't need at a price you can't resist.

Radio Shack needs to bring back the Battery of the Month Club.