[PART 1] Official BLF GT Group Buy thread. Group buy officially closed! Lights shipping.

Editing pictures now….

Ladies and gentlemen’s fasten your seatbelts, you are going to experience GT final edition :smiley:

I believe V1.2 is what was forwarded to LT, and I think V1.2 is what is on the proto, maybe ??

Hard to believe there's a BLFer who doesn't have a Q8

To check the version #:

  • triple click to display voltage,
  • double click to display temperature
  • double click to display the version # (should be either 1 blink and long pause for V1.0, or 1 blink then short pause and 2 blinks for V1.2)

Condensed cliff notes version:

- New reflector is much improved, has some minor specs that don’t affect the beam that are already being worked on by lumintop

- Centering ring is good, just needs to be careful when installing

- Kurling on battery tube, fantastic, could not ask for more

- Lighted switch, 223ua of parasitic drain, about 3 years of standby time with 8 cells

- New Battery carriers are all metal now, double springs, much lower resistance and better design. The button top spring could use a brass or copper coating, needs arrows on all 4 rods

  • Tailcap sticker for protection against reverse installed cell carriers could be improved but is acceptable as is if it had to, going to see if they can make a cutout to prevent the V+ from even being able to hit the tailcap, that would fix it

Overall I would say that Giggles is almost ready for approval with minor tweaks that would not need another prototype.

The last thing that needs to be settled is the LED. I am going to try to test those out later today or tomorrow.

Ok, here are my initial impressions of Giggles V2 as I start breaking it down.


The reflector is a massive improvement, while there is still some minor ringing when held close to a flat surface it is much much better then before. The surface smoothness is now good enough to go into production IMO. Not perfect but really good for such a large reflector at this price point. Further improvements would have minimal if any noticeable improvements to the beam.

There are some minor imperfections on the reflector, minor specs, looks like some dust got caught in the coating process, Lumintop has already confirmed that they are working to fix this for the production run. They are just cosmetic though, they are so small they would have no effect on the actual throw.

So how does this boil down to real world use? VOB still has the V1 prototype (I plan to send him the V2 proto once I am done with it so he can compare them on video), so I can’t compare them side by side. I am going off memory but the hotspot does seem more defined, kind of like the difference between a very mild orange peel and a SMO reflector.

I took some throw readings but due to the very high humidity in Texas my readings are never as good as others and they can vary by quite a bit depending on the day.

In this case it does seem to be averaging roughly ~5% higher than the V1 reflector, which is about what I would expect. Although this LED is different then the V1 so take these numbers with a grain of salt.

Overall I would give the reflector an A, still minor improvements to be made in getting rid of the specs but a passing grade none the less.



The new centering ring also appears to work good, although they will still need to make sure that the production versions are careful with the install. My LED had some minor damage to the silicone but luckily I checked it before tuning the light on and after cleaning it was fine. This is just from being removed and installed several times I am sure, this light has obviously been used for a lot of prototyping.

The next biggest change is the Kurling. All I can say is wow, it is amazing. Somehow it manages to add a surprising amount of grip without feeling abrasive. In fact it feels really good to hold. It also looks fantastic.

A+ on the kurling, could not ask for more.



The tailcap has an added sticker on the inside to provide electrical isolation from the cell carriers, it looks good as well. Not sure how well it will hold up over the long term though. Luckily even if it is missing it would not cause an issue unless the carriers are inserted backwards.

With the new carrier design I think the best option would be to make an indention in the tailcap to prevent the button top of the carrier from being able to contact the tailcap even if it was inserted backwards. There should be plenty of room and would be a simple fix.

It would be acceptable as is if needed though.


I think they forgot to install an o-ring in the tailcap ring, so it rattles a bit but that is just a prototype issue. This needs to be in the final version for sure.

Now for the carriers.

They are very nice, all metal construction and double springs this time.

The polarity protection is also very well done, I like the U shaped cutout, it makes it easier to insert and remove the cells. They did end up soldering the protection PCB to the base PCB for some reason. Not sure why they did this. It can be undone easily with a soldering iron through so not a problem for those that don’t want it. All you need is a $2 iron to do that.

Spring testing is very good as well. The losses in the spring > trace > contact for next cell is only around 40mv at full height (no compression of the springs). If I compress the springs that drops down to around 15mv at max compression (aka, if you used protected cells) or it looks like around 30mv at “normal” cell compression heights.

So voltage loss at 2.5A is less then 0.2v for all 4 springs. Much better then the first carrier.

The “button top spring” on the top of the carrier is not quite as good as the others but about the only improvement it could have is a copper/brass coating, otherwise the spring is about as good as it can get in the space it has. I measured about 75mv voltage drop for the complete connection from the bottom of the carrier to the top.

So grad total the voltage drop in a single carrier at 2.5A should be less then 0.3v and with springs compressed in actual use it should be closer to 0.2V.

That is perfectly acceptable and once again a passing A grade. A brass or copper coating on the button top spring would be nice to see. Also it needs arrows on each “rod” showing the correct way to insert the carrier.






This is the button top spring that could use a copper or brass coating:

The threads and all the other parts of the light are still just as good as the first prototype

The driver firmware appears to be the wrong version, it looks to be using the Q8 ramp table if I had to guess. This should be easily correctable, I am waiting for Tom to get back to me on what version I need to flash to it, otherwise the driver appears to work fine. I will test further once I have the correct firmware.

The indicator LED’s work good. I measured a total of 223ua of parasitic drain with the driver in sleep mode and the indicator LED on. This means that with both carriers full it will have around 3 years of standby time before draining the batteries. I think that is acceptable. It is also not nearly as bright as the Q8 which is nice for night time use. It can be adjusted by the end user by swapping a resistor if they wanted it brighter or they could switch to a clear cover.

Overall an A grade here, this is the most universal setup I can think of, brighter would drain more power then I would like and some people don’t like it that bright and dimmer would make it less useful in some cases.

It does not look quite this bright in person:

So overall this light is basically ready for approval. Just a few minor details to hash out.

Here are a some random pictures to keep you entertained while that happens:







Wow ! Good news !

Just look at that smooth reflector :smiley:

Yeah, it is very close now.

The reflector is not perfect but extremely good for this size of a reflector at this price point. It is very hard to get a good picture of it.

It is much smoother then the V1 prototype but if you look closely you can see it still has very minor rings. They are small enough that you have to be looking for them though.

Thank You Texas_Ace for the update on V2 and all the wonderful pictures!!! It’s looking Good

I noticed the little spots , but I’m sure if LT says it can be fixed it will be fixed :wink: But I’m really impressed with how smooth it is now , on the previous prototype lines etc were clearly visible .

I like how LT works and doesn’t stop to improve things … Great detail to evrything.

I don’t have a Q8 either. I can’t stand NW emitters.

If you were near me i would drop some CW xpl w2 in one Q8 for you :slight_smile: Maybe someone can do it near you !

We don’t have one for very different reasons lol. I just can’t afford it, I love the 3D emitters.

If I get one I am thinking about doing an xhp35 HI swap.

If you do get one it is not hard to swap the emitters.

Are those cut grooves in the reflector considered acceptable?

Maybe they don’t have a cutting tip with a larger radiused edge?

I would think a slightly wavy surface would mess up the reflection angles and put more light into the corona instead of the hotspot.

Idk, I have to defer to the testers and GT team as to whether it’s good or not.

Since the old reflector had bigger grooves and still performed great, I’m guessing this new one should be just fine.

I hear it’s pretty hard to swap emitters on this 2mm thick mcpcb. Maybe there will be a CW version later. For now I have 2 lights running narsil so I am fine.

Grooves? Not sure what you are talking about?

Are you talking about the very slight rings on the reflector? The V2 reflector is much much better then the V1, the rings are hardly noticeable unless you are looking for them.

Lets put it this way, this is already impressive for such a large reflector, to try to make it any better would cost exponentially more money while providing exponentially less performance gain.

I am quite happy with the reflector quality minus the specs. It is easily as good or better then almost any other light I have, just larger so minor imperfections show up more. My D01 reflector looks horrible by comparison and it is a fraction of the size. Even the L2 reflector is about the same proportional quality.

The grooves that are made by the cnc machine. Here is a picture of a rough pass using a square end cutting bit on some plastic.

Once the machine cuts out the majority of the reflectors inner dimensions using a square end bit it then does a slower, more precise pass to smooth out the steps. The final pass should be with a ball nose cutting tip with a large radius cutting surface to get a really smooth finish.

I was thinking they did the final pass with a square end bit instead of a ball nose bit.

Does this make sense?

Thank you Texas_Ace,

It looks very, very nice.

So TA does this mean that we are approving prototype #2 for production? It looks great from your pics.

1) the new nitecore PDOT reflectors also have very noticeable rings

2) when another BLF user hand polished his reflector and made it look perfectly smooth, he lost a ton of lux

3) just because it is smooth does not mean it is better, you need to measure the lux, stop assuming that rings = instantly bad

Yeah, I see what you are talking about. They significantly improved it for the V2 version to the point you really have to look to see the machine marks.

The other factor is feedrate. Slower feedrates would improve the finish but also increase the costs. At this point we are splitting hairs over a few percent of throw that no one will be able to notice anyways. I mean who can really see the different between 1.3 miles of throw and 1.34 miles? lol

So there comes a point where you have to make the tradeoff between quality and cost. In this case I think we have come out way ahead on the deal considering the cost of the light.

It is not official yet but with a few minor tweaks I see no reason it could not be approved in short order.

The firmware is the only big thing that has to be figured out. I am going to flash a new firmware on it when I get home and see if that was the problem.

Rings are bad. No doubt.

Did the BLF user that hand polished his reflector then send it back out to be recoated?

If not, then that is why he lost output. Nothing to do with surface smoothness. You can’t confuse the 2. You need smoothness and a proper finish such as plasma vapor deposition or equivalent.