I was looking for a decent headlamp to replace the ancient $15 dollar special from wal-mart. Figured the Fenix hp10 looked great 4 modes from 7 to 225 lumen output off of AA batteries which is good as I don't do much besides cr123's.

Fast forward to yesterday the first time that I really use it. A broken school bus recovery in 10F weather and it lasted all of 2 hrs. the on\off switch seems to have failed as it might turn on once in 50 clicks of the switch and usually refuses to turn off unless I pull the batteries. It still switches modes just fine but it might take 10 min. of playing around to get it to turn on. Pretty much unless when trying to get something off the street and out traffic while in the dark. I was pretty pissed and its hard to hook up chains and cables with a flashlight in one hand. That was the whole reason of buying the headlamp in the first place.

That sucks - I'd have expected a bit more from a decent brand like that. Can you send it back under warranty?

I emailed both fenix and batteryjunction.com where I bought it tonight. I hadn't even gotten a chance to register it for the warranty before it broke. I would hope that one or the other of them will take care of it. I've read good things about their warranty and overhaul people.

I think I was more mad because we're supposed to be getting another 6" of snow and 25 mph winds so I'm sure that there will be more late nights in the dark where I could have used it. And either way it'll be a couple weeks to send it to one or the other. I thought about buying a new one and then getting a refund back from battery junction but then I've got to pay a re-stock fee and my $70 light will be well over $115 with the shipping of the old and new one.

Was suprised about what you said about this lamp, as I've been considering buying one.

But then it made sense. They're currently "out of stock, backordered" everywhere. I called Fenix to ask them about it, and they said that it is being slightly remanufactured and that their assembly line for it is also being revamped for higher output.
Apparently when this lamp originally hit the market it sold out FAST. I hadnt heard of this problem in the other reviews, but they did mention the revamp on it.

I'm still looking forward to getting one. Hopefully they'll have the kinks out of it. They're supposed to be available in about 3 weeks.

Clickys are the main weak point of any light that has them, and most all lights use the same crappy chines made switches that are not made for the current that we put on them. there are high current switches(http://www.candlep...hread.php?t=248609) made and they are VERY reliable, but they are made for surefire tall caps and i'm not sure if they fit in the fenix tall caps. OR you could mod the tall cap to be a twisty ,i have not played with a fenix before but you basically take out the guts of the cap, than put back in the retaining ring and hotglue a dime in the cap so that its electrically isolated from the cap itself, but makes contact with the battery and the bottom of the battery tube.

Hope everything works out for you.

I see this came back to the top.......figured I would give an update. If you haven't been to battery junction lately they've had a fire and aren't taking orders. Hope they are back up soon they where very quick to respond when I mentioned the problem and have always been very good to deal with.

I didn't end up sending the thing back and I took it apart myself. The rubber around the switches was causing most of the problems. This thing is supposed to be water proof to IPX-8 and I think this particular version they just didn't pull the left over rubber out after it was molded. It was jamming up the top switch that turned it on and off. After cutting out some of the excess with my pocket knife and lubing the o-ring that seals the head unit I put it back together and it was much better.

The switches still aren't perfect although I don't know how much of that is from me pushing on them WAY too hard when it wasn't working right. I was at work with a stranded vehicle on the side of the road and it pissed me off on a large scale.
Its still a little hard to get the double click to get to the strobe modes. Other than that I love the thing its very tough and I've had it out in a down pour So my rubber removal doesn't seem to have affected waterproofing. I love the different modes and its well balanced I would recommend it to anyone that was considering it just with the little heads up about those switches. Its awesomely bright in turbo mode and the low is great for up close reading or fiddling with camera stuff.



For the TL;DR people I had to tweak it a little and now it works pretty good. Get one if you want a good HL.

Awesome, glad you got it sorted out!