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

Mine is probably arriving this week too. Finnish Posti tracking service now shows 1 out of 2 Malaysia Post shipments and says “item arrived in the destination country” today.

I don’t know if there are several definitions for “registered mail” but I always thought it just means a postal service that is more than a simple letter, as in having a tracking code. Whether a retail company arranges the tracking information to be handed out to the customer beforehand is whole another issue. :) I think a lot of the time(with dx, bg, gb etc) the only difference is if tracking number is given to the customer, and the mail service is the same. I sometimes receive stuff that was not supposed to have tracking and I did not have it - but a notice with tracking numbers shows up and a signature is needed at the post office.

I also thought the “alternative shipping option” for “2 parcels by registered mail” originally just meant that one could ask not to be shipped DHL but instead via a traditional mail service. Not necessarily something that always takes 4-6 weeks, while I was prepared for that. Now it seems it’s taking a total of about about 8-10 working days for my shipment to arrive, and for some UK members ~5-6 working days. That is fast but not unheard of. In my limited experience about 1/3 of Asian mail shipments arrive in just over a week, most takes 2-4 weeks and sometimes it takes 4-6 weeks.

I have always understood that registered mail from China or Hong Kong is via sea as opposed to air : ie the slow boat from China that is often referred to.
Maybe I am wrong.
Either way this light has taken 7 days to get from Hong Kong to me :+1:

I received my GT today, 2 parcel registered, it had a pretty big nick, charging 30q batteries to try it, it’s a monster in size, just showing it to 2 people made them laugh out loud.

Big smiles from UK as I am now in possession of my GT. Cells on the chargers, cannot wait. Thanks team.

Tracking says mine is delivered! I get to continue the agonising wait because I’m abroad with work for another couple of weeks :stuck_out_tongue:

GT arrived today, without any extra letters re customs.

Considering HK customs seemed intent on me not having it, sending it back THREE times, I’d say it’s been a relatively quick process.

Thanks to all involved, can’t wait for a large search at night to come in at work so I can use it properly :slight_smile:

DHL announced my package to arrive tommorow - handling in Germany seems to be via Sun Logistik Service GmbH!

No clou if they want ‘extra money’ from me!

On it goes …

Bear in mind it’s not unheard of for delivery companies (DHL especially) to send an invoice a few weeks after delivery asking for VAT and handling payment.

It would be a bit late once you’ve got your GT , guess what they can do with that request :smiling_imp:

11.02.2018 03:37:50
1 day Item despatched to Transshipment hub
SHENZHEN cPacket Express

11.02.2018 03:42:14
1 day Received shipment
Shenzhen cPacket Express

11.02.2018 03:43:14
1 day Processed at origin hub
Shenzhen cPacket Express

13.02.2018 07:23:15
3 day On Vehicle to Transshipment Hub
Shenzhen cPacket Express

15.02.2018 02:45:10
5 day Electronic information submitted by shipper
RICHMOND cPacket Express

15.02.2018 19:50:00
5 day Uplifted from Transshipment Hub
HONG KONG

Not sure what that last one means (Uplifted from Transshipment Hub)… but I am happy to see that its on its way to me! :smiley: Thanks to everyone involved in any and ever way with this project, your hard work and dedication is greatly and truly appreciated!

Mine was delivered by Royal Mail tracked 48 hour service & came from a London address.
It looks to me like Lumintop shipped the light to London & then someone in London shipped it to me via Royal Mail.
Who was yours delivered by ?

Just a question are there more shipments like this ?

2018-02-07 08:16 The Item is at the shippers warehouse

Well, they’ve your name and address, and tax owed is a legal obligation, so I guess details will get passed to a debt collection agency.

But I’m just speculating and pointing out that it doesn’t matter you’ve received the GT already.

My BLF GT came!. I’m in the UK and used registered for those who wonder and didn’t get hit by any customs. Thanks to the team and all involved - it’s an amazing light.

I don’t know about the UK, but sounds implausible. A company sending an invoice to a customer who never ordered anything from them. Just signing to receive one’s own belongings hardly makes one responsible for purchasing anything else from a courier company. But then again, I don’t know about the UK and how Draconian laws you might have in place.

Quite possible they could if they really guesstimated VAT and already paid for it. Sound like fraud, but if this is the standard procedure, might be OK, thus requiring the recipient to actually pay. It’s a very foreign idea to me that a private company could conspire with the customs to forge a receipt to be used for charging some random amount of VAT from a citizen. The proper procedure would be the Customs to contact the recipient and bill them.

I’m not saying you are wrong, but it was always my understanding that the typical air mail we use today is also “registered mail” by definition.

The “slow boat from China” often refers to air mail, too. The economy option can be really slow even when the carrier decides to use air mail from, say, Mainland China to a European country. There could be lots of delay before and after the flight part of the journey. Air transit could be comparably very cheap if you don’t need the next flight and could do with any suitable connection within the next two weeks.

The reasoning is similar to airline passenger tickets: sometimes you can book flights for a price that would hardly cover fuel. It’s just better business to have something extra on board instead of nothing more when you’re flying anyway and the aircraft is not even half full.

The same applies to non-aviation logistics. It’s going to be cheaper to transport goods on rubber wheels when you don’t need it delivered ASAP and it can just be covered in a pile of other non-critical parcels using an almost First In, Last Out principle.

Arrived here, registered with batteries. Just waiting on the batteries charging. Thanks to all the GT team :smiley:

The way it works in the UK is like this

  1. If the item is being shipped from the sender to the buyer via eg DHL the entire journey, then DHL contact the buyer when the item reaches the UK to charge the buyer the amount of VAT due plus a processing fee as they then pay VAT to customs on your behalf .
  2. If the item is being delivered within the UK by the Royal Mail (UK postal service) customs contact you & you have to pay the VT before the item is released to be delivered to you.
    Either way, as far as I know anyway, you have to pay VAT before you receive an item as you are given the choice of not paying VAT & not receiving the item.
    I do not believe that I will be receiving a retrospective bill after I have received this package.
    One other thing I noticed about my package apart from the fact there is no mention of the package coming from Hong Kong on the labelling just a London address, is that there is no value what so ever on the labelling.
    This reinforces my belief that the package was sent to somebody in the UK first then posted from there to me as a separate, internal to the UK, shipping transaction.

Went out tonight and did a few poor beamshots, was only on my phone. managed to hit a reflector on a building almost exactly 2 miles away! it has a small white light on it too - you can’t see the reflector in the photo sadly as the pics are from the beach.
Lovely night for it - I shone it from Henry VIII’s Sandsfoot Castle (the window opposite the door in the photo below to the last light building on the middle section of Portland Breakwater (Portland end) - Google Earth shows it as 1.99 Miles! Had a bit of a burn up with my BLF -TE and it was nearly as far, just way less powerful!





Nice shots Goose!
Can’t wait for my GT