Finally got my BLF Tank multimode E07. Of course it has the problems described, but this was my first chance to examine it.
First thing I did was to take my normal E07 and swap the parts. Here's what I found:
The new head and the old head both work perfectly fine on the old body - no gap issues.
The new body has gap issues with both the new head and the old head.
The new body and the old body look identical except for the BLF markings. Dimensionally this is not surprising as most of us believe the problem to be the new head. However, since the new head works perfectly with the old body I think the problem is in the body. Sure enough if you turn the ring on the body, the old body will turn ~360 degrees, but the new body will only turn ~180. So the amount of tolerance is much less in the new body. Or another way to say it is the old body will accommodate longer battery lengths since it will rotate up and down more.
One concern with this light is that there was no preproduction sample. Based on what I see, it is likely that a preproduction sample would have been fine. What Tank would do to make a preproduction sample would be to take the new designed head and mate it with an old body. This would work great. I suspect that either the manufacturing group coincidentally decided to modify the body or the QC of the on/off mechanism was not checked to determine if the travel was the same. The end result is that we got a light which has a gap when used with alkalines or 14500's.
One easy remedy would be for Tank to send replacement bodies - I think they will find that the new bodies will give them problems as new batches of the standard E07 are made and they will discover the problem is the change to the travel of the on/off switch. This fix wouldn't cost them that much since the major cost is the head. One downside however, is that anyone who has modified their BLF edition by sanding down the head, will likely not want an old style body as the tolerance may be now at the point where the battery isn't long enough.
I actually like this light. Most budget lights IMHO tend to require some tweaking - resoldering, cleaning, lubing, etc. This one apparently is no different.
This is obviously only one data point, so those of you who have both E07's, feel free to add your findings.
One last comment - I think Jim at Manafont has been wonderful through all this. He has been screwed by the folks at Tank and I think he is trying everything he can to make things right.
Sam
