Moral of the story: test your gear.

[That_FNG]

Test your gear.

today I decided to do another quick range trip with the M&P 2.0 in 10mm. Shot 200 rounds of sig sauer 10mm and on round 200 the TLR-7X decided to say “peace I’m out!” And went flying. Found all the parts and determined the mounting screw sheared off the side clamp. Gonna reach out to Streamlight on Monday to see about replacement parts. Moral of the story is always test your gear to a reasonable level before trusting it. For me a light, optic or gun has to go 1k rounds with no failures before I’m willing to conceal carry it.

 

[Darth]

Testing is always great, but i go with the mindset "something is going to fail. "

You need to prepare for the failure of any piece of gear. It's a bit of an gamblers fallacy that if you buy brand x, you don't have to worry about that. I always worry when people say stuff like "Well my X hasn't failed and I've got Xxxx rounds through it. " 2 things. The first is, you haven't shot it enough to fail yet, and second, statistically, each shot is bringing you closer to a failure.

I have a TLR-1 HL under my G20C bedside gun and I regularly practice with an offhand flashlight with crossed wrists.

What broke on my TLR was the battery door hinge. Apparently it happens enough that they have the replacement available cheap.

 

[HEX]

Testing is always great, but i go with the mindset "something is going to fail. "

Yep.

For me a light, optic or gun has to go 1k rounds with no failures before I’m willing to conceal carry it.

I have no issue with the practice, and of course I believe in testing with any different ammo you're going to carry and all that, but one can also just as logically look at it like you've then put 1000 rounds of wear and tear on parts that might have an issue, so they may be 5 rounds away from breaking rather than 1005.
You just don't know. Stuff is gonna fail.

 

[That_FNG]

Yep.



I have no issue with the practice, and of course I believe in testing with any different ammo you're going to carry and all that, but one can also just as logically look at it like you've then put 1000 rounds of wear and tear on parts that might have an issue, so they may be 5 rounds away from breaking rather than 1005.
You just don't know. Stuff is gonna fail.

Absolutely stuff is going to break. We all have a diffferent comfort level of expectations for what stuff should be expected to last before failure. My point is more don’t just buy something and assume it’s going to work without some sort of use testing. For me it is 1k rounds, for others it may be more, it may less, and that is perfectly fine. For me I do expect a WML to go longer than a couple of hundred rounds before failing.

 

[HEX]

Absolutely stuff is going to break. We all have a diffferent comfort level of expectations for what stuff should be expected to last before failure. My point is more don’t just buy something and assume it’s going to work without some sort of use testing. For me it is 1k rounds, for others it may be more, it may less, and that is perfectly fine. For me I do expect a WML to go longer than a couple of hundred rounds before failing.

Sure, yeah. I'd be pretty displeased with that too for sure.

 

[spat]

Yep.



I have no issue with the practice, and of course I believe in testing with any different ammo you're going to carry and all that, but one can also just as logically look at it like you've then put 1000 rounds of wear and tear on parts that might have an issue, so they may be 5 rounds away from breaking rather than 1005.
You just don't know. Stuff is gonna fail.

When it comes to probability, no matter how good your odds are, if roll the dice often enough, eventually they'll come up snake eyes.

But, when the odds are unknown, repeated success will give you confidence that the odds of failure are low.

If it's been successful 1000 times in the row, you're confidence that it won't fail on 1001.

Now, it's possible that the MTBF for that part is 1000 times, and every success brings you closer to it wearing out. But when you don't know the MTBF, ann you can work from is what you know.

Ideally, you'd have 100 copies of the rig, and you'd run them all to failure and then you'd have high confidence in how long 101 would last. But most of us don't have the resources of the Aberdeen proving ground to pull that off.

Best we can do is read about what results the people who do have those resources get.

 

[HEX]

When it comes to probability, no matter how good your odds are, if roll the dice often enough, eventually they'll come up snake eyes.

But, when the odds are unknown, repeated success will give you confidence that the odds of failure are low.

If it's been successful 1000 times in the row, you're confidence that it won't fail on 1001.

A bit off topic, but on that idea I wanted to drop the suggestion for a book for folks to read for people to understand this in ways that they don't even know they don't understand. It might just blow your mind. It's called Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences , written by John Allen Paulos. Not a hugely long read either, like 170 pages os something close to that.

Blurb from amazon - "Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we're missing, and how we can do something about it. Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing."

IMHO, absolutely worth the short read. I read this many years ago and still think about it where numbers are concerned in regard to so many things. It was written in 1988, so there's some ideas that aren't exactly current, but they're not important to get the points.

 

[Rocpo]

I've had a couple failures with Streamlight. It's chicom shit. Unfortunately, my agency decided to go with the TLR.

I MUCH prefer Surefire. I've NEVER had a failure with a Surefire product to date, over 15+ years of usage.