The MDC is a light that I have loved for a while. The original with its over the top clip was so close to perfect that the mistakes drove me nuts. Then I finally got around to reviewing the Gen 2 MDC and it was awesome. I carried it quite a bit and usually when I wanted to do heavy dirty work.

In the fall last year, on the weekend of October 14 and 15, the MDC went missing. I was trimming dead plants, bagging copious amounts of leaves, and doing lots and lots of yardwork. My kids also have a little wooded area where they play and hang out on the side of the yard. So between cleaning out the bagger and getting random tools out of the wooded area, there was a lot of bending down and getting stuff. Perhaps in all that activity the light fell out of my pocket. Or, perhaps, as they were cleaning up my kids grabbed the MDC to search for an item just as the sun went down in the wooded area. Either way, on the Saturday it went missing. I spend about an hour retracing my steps the following day to no avail.

As clean up continued over the next month, I was always on the lookout for the light. I am pretty good about not losing gear and so this stuck in my crawl a bit. As the yard got buttoned up for the winter, I still hadn’t found the MDC. In the early spring I did some more maintenance hoping to find the light and alas, nothing. By June I had given up hope. I was sure the next person to see the light was going to be an AI artificial human palentologist millions of years in the future.

Then my son found it, at the edge of the wooded area, buried beneath yard waste and pushed deep into the mud. He was weed whacking and heard a pinging sound. When he bent down to see what it was, he found the light. Here is what he saw:

I took the light out of the indent and here is how precisely it fit in the mud (you can see the head pointing left and the find rings on the bottom of the head in the mud):

He found it when I wasn’t home (so I recreated the scene which was quite easy give how precisely matched the impression is. He said it worked right away. Here is the light when I got home:

Here is a less harshly lit picture so you can see just how mucky this torch was:

I turned it on and again, it worked flawlessly. I then gave it a bath in some dish soap, cleaned out the machining pattern with a toothpick and relubed the threads. The battery was fine. After some drying off, here is what was left:

You probably know this if you read this site, but in case you don’t here is the conclusion—Malkoff makes some of the best, most durable, simplest to use torches on the market. They are made in the US, they have strong runtimes with real highs, and they absolutely sip batteries. They are bombproof. If you are looking for a torch that fits those parameters, go check them out. I can’t think of a better endorsement than this little unintentional experiment.