Gold Lights

Summary: Maglite occasionally produces special gold anodized lights. These lights were mainly produced in the 1980s. They are very rare and highly desired among collectors.

Currently Mag Instrument produces Maglites in a variety of finishes but this was not always the case. In my prior post about non-letter serial colors I made reference to 2 very rare finishes, gold and camo. I covered the camo in an earlier post, here. This post is about the rare gold anodizing. It seems like up until 1989 Mag Instrument produced the four standard finishes, black, blue, silver, and red with silver starting a little after 1980 and the rest starting regular production in 1980. It's worth noting that Mag Instrument also experimented with some odd colors very early on and in extremely small quantities as detailed here. Mag Instrument started trying different finishes to appeal to the civilian market. The unique finishes would eventually go on to become part of Maglite's success in tapping into the previous unrecognized civilian and trade market so it's interesting to see where and how it all started.

The 3D shown below is a 1,800,000 serial which puts it right at 1989. It's interesting in that this is only 100,000 away from the camo light I have. At the time Maglite had been in business 10 years but had barely sold 2,000,000 3D lights. Whereas now, based on the serials and years I have, Mag easily moves 2,000,000 3D incans a year. This is obviously huge growth and the type of sales numbers Mag Instrument was always looking for. The 3D also came with a 2nd gen gold Mini Mag that ran from late 1986 to 1991. This Mini Maglite is gold anodized. Maglite also made a gold plated Mini Maglite which I've covered here. The gold plated version is far more rare and expensive. The owner told me he purchased the 3D and the Mini Maglite at the same time but in separate packages. Nothing says 1989 like a pair of gold Maglites!!!

C cells are much rarer in general because they sold poorly compared to D cells. That makes finishes even rarer on C cells especially from the early days. The 2C shown below has a 335,089 serial and is also from 1989. I e-mailed Mag Instrument to find out the dates of production and this is just months apart from the 3D so it must have been done in the same anodizing batch as the 3D. Maglite has not produced a letter serial in a gold finish so I doubt these were done again after 1989 because the letter serials came out in 1992 on D cells. Other gold lights also have similar serials.

Shown below is my like new 1982 gold 2D. There must have been a small batch made then as well. It has the TM bezel instead of the R bezel like the above lights. For those interested these differences are detailed in my D Cell Quick Dating Guide. This 2D is serial 364,026.

I also have a 1992 2D. This Maglite is serial number 4,218,918 and is one of the first 2Ds made after the lights changed over to the newer style, Panther lights, in 1992. The prior owner told me that this light was done in gold as a special marketing effort to promote the updated Maglite. It must be very rare because it's the only one of a couple gold Panther style lights I've ever seen or heard of. It was well used over the years but when I received it, it didn't take much to get in running in tip top shape.

I'm not much of a collector of modern Maglites but I had to pick up one of these. Maglite made a batch of gold full size lights for the 2018 Oscars. They are shown in the pic below from Maglite's Twitter feed. Mag also sold a handful of these too in retail packaging around the same time. I was lucky enough to pick one up and pics of it are below. I'd love to get a 2nd one to take out of the package and use. My guess is that Mag had a run of these done as giveaways and sold the extras. It is an LED model and I bought the light from Mag's website. It was $39.99, the same as the other finishes.

As always I'm looking to buy Vari-Beams and Vintage/Rare Mags. Please let me know if you have any, top dollar paid.