Wyoming Arms Weapon Light Review
With the advances that are being made with LED technology in recent years handheld flashlights and weapon mounted lights have been getting smaller, brighter and cheaper. In fact, it seems like the advances are happening at the speed of…well, nevermind…
I recently had the chance to review a new weapon mounted light from John Burns at Wyoming Arms. You might recognize John’s name from the Beyond Belief long range hunting videos and the Best Of The West cable series. At Wyoming Arms, John is now building AR-15s and by all accounts is doing a great job at it.
Another product that Wyoming Arms is producing is a weapon mounted light based on the popular Fenix PD35. Although not well known as weapon mounted lights, Fenix’s lights are very popular among those looking for high lumen, low cost handheld flashlights. Wyoming Arms has come up with an ingenious mounting solution for the Fenix PD35 light that replaces the body of the light with an integral picatinny mount. The integral mount keeps the light very low profile and ensures that the light won’t every “shoot loose” from it’s mount. I have a 15″ free float rail on my patrol rifle and I found that if I moved the fixed front sight back to the normal gas block position I could mount the PD35 at 12 o’clock on the top rail and still actuate the pushbutton tailcap. With my Troy Alpha rail, I found that I could mount the light at 11 or 1 o’clock without having to purchase any additional offset rails and this is the set up that I’ve settled on for my rifle.
After my review the only change I wanted to make to make – the button that adjusts the light’s brightness nearly inaccessible. For my uses, I’d only want the light set for 850 lumens and I wouldn’t want it to get clicked to another setting while in a rack of my patrol car or in use. I mentioned this to John Burns and he explained that he’s already developed washers to add between the light’s body and head to keep that adjustment button rotated out of the way and had several of those washers in the mail to me the next day.
Wyoming Arms PD35 Integral Mount
To compare the Fenix to more commonly known weapon mounted lights I conducted a test comparing it to a Surefire X300U, a Surefire Scout M600U. I also included a Streamlight TLR1 in the test. The TLR1 isn’t in the same class as the other three higher lumen lights, but I included it as a reference in case anyone is currently using a similar light on their rifle.
READ ENTIRE ARTICLE AT AUSTIN POLICE MARKSMANSHIP TEAM WEBSITE
