Matt Bransky couldn’t do his job without a bright flashlight. Matt is an aircraft mechanic for Southwest Airlines. So when planes are grounded overnight, he relies on his trusty flashlight to illuminate his work area.
When one of his flashlights stopped working a few years ago, Matt figured he could fix it. After all, he is a mechanic. So he searched online for tips on how to take a flashlight apart and found CandlePowerForums. The online forum is dedicated to a variety of lighting discussions including flashlights, lanterns, spotlights, night vision scopes, and headlamps. Matt’s simple Google search in 2006 soon sparked a new hobby and helped him meet new friends when he later moved from Chicago to Dallas.
CandlePowerForums boasts more than 114,000 members, many of whom regularly pose questions about the lights they’re building or customizing, show off custom lights they’ve created and reminisce on topics like “What was your first loved flashlight?” Many of the posts center around the usage of LEDs.
“It’s just a share and share community,” he said. “Someone comes up with an idea and everyone else runs with it.”
CandlePowerForum members at the Dallas-Fort Worth meetup.
Matt says he reads more than he posts on the forums. And while he says he has a broad range of knowledge about LED components and flashlight parts, he considers his knowledge intermediate compared to some of the knowledgeable participants in the forum.
And since the CandlePowerForums community has so much to share online, some of them even get together offline for meetups. When Matt moved to Dallas a few years ago, he found out about one and went. Soon he was helping organize them.
The latest Dallas-Fort Worth Meetup was May 8, where 21 like-minded light-lovers showed up to continue their online discussions in the flesh. “It’s a time when you can meet with people who don’t think you’re weird for talking about flashlights,” Matt said.
CandlePowerForum members in the Dallas-Fort Worth area got together May 8 to talk about lights.
We thanked Matt for reaching out to us by sending him a couple of CreeLEDRevolution.com T-shirts and collapsible Coleman lanterns lit by a Cree XLamp® XR-E LED. We hope the prizes ended up in LED-loving hands.
