Video Transcript
Why Use Different Mounting Styles? (00:02):
So we get a lot of questions why our guns have different styles of weapon light mounting on them. We're not putting all of our lights on one side of the gun or one position on the gun. We have also quite a few different lights. So I wanna talk about a few principles that we take into consideration when we are putting weapon lights on guns.
First Principle: Intuition (00:20):
And the first one is intuition. If you are mounting a weapon light to a rifle, which you should be, because seeing is actually pretty cool, you need to be able to turn that light on quickly and efficiently. Not with, you know, "Oh, I need to turn my light on." Then you come all the way around the rail to actually activate it. It needs to be in such a position that you change your grip minimally. And the time it takes from your brain saying, "Turn the light on," to the light actually coming on is as minimal as possible. So if I mount the SureFire M600 to the right side of the gun and I'm a right-handed shooter, so my support hand is here, and I wanna all of a sudden activate my light… not very intuitive with this particular switch style. It's not gonna be fast when I decide, "Oh, I need my light to be on right this second." It may take half a second for me to actually turn this light on. And that is a problem.
I could run it on the top where my thumb is going to naturally be for gripping my rifle. Not bad, but now it starts to block my ACOG. The T-2 on top though, not a problem. That's why you do see people running, you know, X300s and TLR-1s and stuff on the top. Typically the left side of the gun, if you're running a standard pressure switch on the light itself is going to be fairly intuitive. It's where your hand naturally is. And you're good to go.
Mounting on Shorter Guns (01:32):
However, if you are running a shorter gun—because this is a 14.5" with I think this is a 12" Picatinny rail—if you're running something like this MK18. Well now where my hand needs to go to control the gun is starting to get in the way of where that light may sit if I were to run it on the left side. And that's where mounting on the opposite side and running something like a pressure switch comes into play. Where I could still have that easy on/off activation, when my mind goes to, "Light comes on," the light comes on in literally point like one tenth of a second or whatever.
Mounting on Suppressed Rifles (02:03):
But then the question is like on weirder guns, you know, let's say you, we have a longer barrel and we want to push that light further out or maybe we have a suppressor. Then what do we do? That's where pressure pads come into play. I could even lightbar this sucker off the left side of the gun right here, run the pressure pad further back for the intuition of where my hand is gonna sit on the gun. And that's why pressure pads are pretty sick and they're pretty dope. And then there's guns like this—the Rattler. And this is where our lightbar really comes into play because there is very little real estate on this gun to mount a rifle light. There's no way I'm really gonna mount it on the left side of the gun where my hand is sitting, because I'm literally gonna have to just hold onto the light as I'm shooting the gun. I could put it on the opposite side, but now when I fold the stock, I have inconsistent bulge on right side and left side.
So what the lightbar does here is it frees up real estate on the rail because I already have a tiny little area to actually hold onto the gun. I'm able to put the light on the same side as my folding stock, which is one of my favorite things to do if I can, because that is gonna keep the entire thing much more streamlined when it goes into a bag or if this side is on the inside of the bag, which will draw much smoother than catching on the weapon light, catching on the stock, et cetera.
Then based on how this is set up I'm not even using a pressure pad because I don't need to. This is sitting in a perfect position for my thumb to articulate the light, using a momentary only pad. So I have that good intuition, it's in a good place in relation to my stock and fitting it into a bag. It also is sitting far, you know, far out to prevent suppressor shadow or minimal suppressor shadow.
Think It Through, Test It Out (03:37):
So those are all things to think about when you're mounting a light. But I see a lot of people who either are just getting into guns; they've just bought their first rifle. They know they need a weapon light. They saw on Springfield's website, a rifle with a weapon light, which I do think is awesome that companies are showing weapon lights on their rifles from other companies, lights they don't even make. We didn't really see that eight years ago, companies doing that. It was just gun and there was no light on there. And people are seeing, "Well, maybe I need to have a light on this gun. Probably should have a red dot as well. Where do I put the light?" And I see a lot of people making mistakes. They just kind of slap it on there as an afterthought. And when they actually have to go turn the light on, is that gonna be very effective? Is it gonna be quick? And the answer is for, in a lot of cases that I see from new gun owners, it's not.
Second Principle: Grip (04:20):
So the big one is intuition. And then the second one is just how it fits into how you're holding the rifle for maximum shooting performance. And using pressure switches and having longer rails that you can punch the light out on is going to allow both of those things to happen. Whether you mount the light on the left side, the right side, underneath, above, whatever, it doesn't really matter. As long as you have that good intuition. And it's, you know, it's consistent, it's repeatable. And that's why we have a lot of different guns with different light setups because they're different lengths, different setups. They have folding stocks; they don't. They have suppressors; they don't. And that's why we don't just do one system for all of them. We optimize the light for that gun, for intuition and for the performance of that weapon.
Specific Loadouts (05:01):
So I hope that's helpful, if you have any other questions, though, you can email us [email protected], even asking potentially about specific guns and how we set up our lights. And maybe the guys will shoot you over a little picture of what that looks like. We also have a bunch of loadouts on our website. If you wanna see detailed photos of how we have things set up. But there's a lot of ways of doing it, but definitely give some thought to it.