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

[Wennn]

@JasonWW

@Wennn

Okay, the my is coming by FedEx (Yes, not DHL) on the 23rd. No email from Neal, but a message straight from FedEx instead.

Good to hear. Is there a ship date?
18th, 19th, 20th?

I’ll wait for a few more reports before updating page one.

Yes, shipping label created on 19th, estimated ship date 20th, estimated arrival 23rd morning.

[bella-headlight]

@JasonWW

@bella-headlight

I am in the first 555 paid, registered shipping, no batteries to the UK & have not been posting in this thread just patiently waiting
Am I right in thinking that the last of the first 555 DHL shipments have now been made & that next week the first of the non USA non DHL shipments will be sent ?

The whole 555 thing was about payments and prices. That is done. Now it is about the first 850 orders (#1 to #1049).

There are still USA DHL shipments to be made.

We don’t know what will be shipped next week as we haven’t figured out what all was shipped this week.

Thanks Jason as that was why I asked as I have found this thread a little difficult to follow where shipping is concerned.
So most of the first 555 have been shipped ?
Hopefully in the next week or 2 there will be another 2 shipments of around 150 units each which hopefully will start to include the registered shipping ones ?
I am just hoping that mine gets shipped before Chinese new year as registered will mean that it will take about 4 weeks without any hold ups so I am hoping that I might get it by the end of Feb/early March ?

[BanglaBob]

@Wennn

Okay, the my is coming by FedEx (Yes, not DHL) on the 23rd. No email from Neal, but a message straight from FedEx instead.

Me too :D

Just got an sms from Fedex; delivery on the 23rd as well. So that makes two of us :THUMBS-UP:

[leaftye]

I finally made some time to try mine out, and I’m quite sure this is my best thrower by far without even testing it against my other throwers. Not that I have a bunch of awesome throwers…

[DoNkEyConN]

@BanglaBob

@Wennn

Okay, the my is coming by FedEx (Yes, not DHL) on the 23rd. No email from Neal, but a message straight from FedEx instead.

Me too

Just got an sms from Fedex; delivery on the 23rd as well. So that makes two of us :+1:

Where are you located BanglaBob?

[JamesB]

[teacher]

JamesB wrote:
.

…………
. . ……. :+1:

[Wennn]

@DoNkEyConN

@BanglaBob

@Wennn

Okay, the my is coming by FedEx (Yes, not DHL) on the 23rd. No email from Neal, but a message straight from FedEx instead.

Me too

Just got an sms from Fedex; delivery on the 23rd as well. So that makes two of us :+1:

Where are you located BanglaBob?

Singapore.

[Bozlight29]

@JamesB

!http://i.cubeupload.com/ydNvjv.jpg!

haha lol, the registered GT’s are even bigger! Let’s hope the motorcycle with steering wheel doesn’t brake down. I will notify them (although they got thousands of mails) that France has “peage” and they better come to The Netherlands first. :)

[Eraursls1984]

@JasonWW

@bella-headlight

I am in the first 555 paid, registered shipping, no batteries to the UK & have not been posting in this thread just patiently waiting
Am I right in thinking that the last of the first 555 DHL shipments have now been made & that next week the first of the non USA non DHL shipments will be sent ?

The whole 555 thing was about payments and prices. That is done. Now it is about the first 850 orders (#1 to #1049).

There are still USA DHL shipments to be made.

We don’t know what will be shipped next week as we haven’t figured out what all was shipped this week.

According to Neal all US orders have shipped, from a message I received around 4 AM EST January 19th.

[Texas_Ace]

@Eraursls1984

According to Neal all US orders have shipped, from a message I received around 4 AM EST January 19th.

Keep in mind that this can mean “all the US orders are about to ship”.

Some things get lost in translation. Although generally when I hear this the shipment is confirmed a few days later, so expect it to indeed be shipped shortly if not already.

[Texas_Ace]

@DB Custom

If it boils down to the entire process teaching some new techniques that improve the product over the course of this group buy, would it be possible in the end to purchase a new reflector or other parts? I don’t have an issue with my reflector, but am sort of on the OCD side and if there’s a “near perfect” one being made at the end of all this I’d sure like to procure one.

I know Lumintop will want to sit down and take a breather at the end of this, and of course I’ll be in no particular hurry, just saying that it’d be nice if some parts would be individually available.

Seems to me it would have been beneficial to stick to a pre-determined final quantity for the group buy. Be that 555 or 250 or whatever, it did seem to go on a long time and at the back end of it all the numbers of people signing in went a bit crazy. I’d like to see Lumintop make money on these so they will be happy to work with us in the future, hope this “ordeal” hasn’t soured anything.

This is something I will ask about along with the xhp70.2 mcpcb’s once the GB is closer to being complete.

[Texas_Ace]

@DENGOH

@Texas_Ace

@Aslan

@Eraursls1984

I wonder how Neal chooses whom to answer, and who does not, he never answered me.

When you have hundreds of messages a day, you simply don’t have time to answer them all. Been there, done that.

You have to scan them and find the ones that you can actually do something about or provide new information to and prioritize those.

Basic status checks and the like make up a large portion of the messages both he and I are getting and there is simply nothing else we can tell you in most cases besides lights are shipping each week.

This reminds me one senior manager once told me he has to spend 4hours everyday just to read and answer emails. Besides quantity is very discouraging, it is also finding correct information part that’s time consuming and might need to confirm with third or fourth persons. Imagine you have to reply all these.

Indeed, there are days where I easily spend 4+ hours just dealing with messages and such. Back when the payments were happening it was basically an all day, every day job to keep up with everything. Good thing I happened to be off work then.

Neal gets way more messages then me, I have no idea how he keeps up as good as he does.

[Texas_Ace]

@DB Custom

Keisari, Kawiboy is pulling 22 amps through his 6V XHP-70, figure the wattage on that little oven why don’t you?

Tomorrow a couple of friends from here are coming up from the coast and we’ll be doing an emitter swap in their GT’s. I have mine and one I bought for a gift so we’ll have 4 GT’s to play with. Plan on getting some photo’s.

Keep in mind only a fairly small percentage of that wattage is exiting via the beam. A good estimate is between 10-30%.

So figure that the current will drop in a hurry and an more realistic wattage is around ~110W average over the time it would take to heat something.

And you get 15-40W worth of power for heating something with the beam.

Now the body of the light would be much more effective for heating something but it would be much harder to get access to that heat.

[Bozlight29]

I read all the time that Neal gets hundreds of mails and messages every day. How do you know that TA? Are we all sending him mails and messages the whole day? Not me. Does he have so much customers that he receives that much mail? I had a great running business, but I didn’t get hundreds of mails every day. I guess Neal is a busy man, but ain’t we all?

[JasonWW]

@Texas_Ace

@DB Custom

If it boils down to the entire process teaching some new techniques that improve the product over the course of this group buy, would it be possible in the end to purchase a new reflector or other parts? I don’t have an issue with my reflector, but am sort of on the OCD side and if there’s a “near perfect” one being made at the end of all this I’d sure like to procure one.

I know Lumintop will want to sit down and take a breather at the end of this, and of course I’ll be in no particular hurry, just saying that it’d be nice if some parts would be individually available.

Seems to me it would have been beneficial to stick to a pre-determined final quantity for the group buy. Be that 555 or 250 or whatever, it did seem to go on a long time and at the back end of it all the numbers of people signing in went a bit crazy. I’d like to see Lumintop make money on these so they will be happy to work with us in the future, hope this “ordeal” hasn’t soured anything.

This is something I will ask about along with the xhp70.2 mcpcb’s once the GB is closer to being complete.

I wonder if they could offer their xhp35 mcpcb as well? This makes it easier for folks to swap in a different tint or a HD version.

[teacher]

/\\\ +1

[Texas_Ace]

@Bozlight29

I read all the time that Neal gets hundreds of mails and messages every day. How do you know that TA? Are we all sending him mails and messages the whole day? Not me. Does he have so much customers that he receives that much mail? I had a great running business, but I didn’t get hundreds of mails every day. I guess Neal is a busy man, but ain’t we all?

He may not get that many every single day anymore but back in December he was. He has not been around as much since his wedding. I would still easily estimate 100 messages a day for him based on how many I am getting. Still I can easily get 25-50 messages a day not even inducing this thread.

Figure each message can take 2-4 minutes to reply to depending on what the question is and that is ~2 hours a day easy just for messages. Which sounds about right. Generally have to spend all my free time in the morning on this GB and then catch up again at night if I have time.

Heck I would easily wake up to 100+ messages daily for most of December and I get a lot less then he does. He is the one that had to deal with all the payments, address, phone number, and other emails and questions + the normal direct questions from people, I just had to deal with direct questions from people.

I also ran an online business and got way less emails per sale then this, this is the nature of a GB like this, it takes WAY more time and effort then just selling something on a commercial website. Which is why a lot of companies won’t do them or need someone else to handle all these details for them to agree to do it.

Plus some decisions that were made early on caused us a lot of extra work here at the end. Things will be different for any future GB’s.

[Bozlight29]

Yeah, I understand that’s been a huge effort for everyone in the team. But I am hoping now things are a bit back to normal. But it’s good to evaluate this at the end of the GB. This GT seems very popular, I guess more than expected. That means a lot of extra work and pressure.

[johny723]

Any info on when the registered shipping to Europe will start?