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

I know, but I’m pretty sure they were wanting to get away from these really low Group Buy prices so they can make some better profit margins. Let me crunch a few numbers.

If the average shipping cost is $40 then $157 - $40 = $117. Maybe they are making a tiny profit, but combined with the losses from the $115 price ($115 - $40 = $75), it equals out to practically no profit. That’s like 4 months of no profit from this light since it started rolling off the assembly line. Plus the months spent developing it. That’s quite upsetting for the company who had to invest a really huge amount of money to produce this new model.

At $165 plus shipping, that’s an extra $43 per light. I guess that is pretty decent profit, but still not enough to make up for the last 4 months. I assumed they would sell it for a higher price than that.

I guess if it were selling through Banggood or Gearbest then $200 plus shipping might be about right. I assume their Aliexpress store is factory direct, so they cut out a middle man and can still do okay at the $165 plus shipping price.

The bad thing is, they still have at least another 3 months of group buy orders to put out (650 lights) at this lower profit margin price. Lumintop execs might consider the GT a flop. They may not be able to pay off their investment until well after the Group Buy is finished and they can sell them to the public.

Sorry for the rambling.

Earlier it was part of project GT 101 basic knowledge that alternative shipping(via a chain of mail organizations) to some countries was more expensive, and sometimes a whole lot more expensive which was supposedly the core of the whole problem.

It was also one reason for splitting the light in two boxes for alternative shipping, the other being even restrictions in maximum parcel maximum size and/or weight. These factors in turn probably caused the split-in-two shipments to have very little padding in the larger box to protect the more delicate head.

You wrong: for Spain,LT used registered 2 boxes no padding at all and 1 box (DHL style perfectly protected) ; never there was a mention that would say that registered shipping doesnt deserve the least padding at all , more it seams they’ve done it so people would change their mind in future with registered shipping (even though in Europe, DHL means another 80-110€ fees)!,There is no excuse that registered shipping to be sent with no protection at all……

They dont, because they have been hustling the GT direct threw FB and other channels for a while now.

PS: Thanks for the rude mark for the above post… :+1: :person_facepalming:
Guessing by whose been active recently, I got a good idea who it was

Wow, there is some wrong information and some bad assumptions. Was it you who said all this same stuff a while back or was it someone else? I’ve heard all this same rhetoric before about how Lumintop and Neal are trying to scam us. Normally I would search the thread to find out, but it’s super slow recently. I’ll just write it fresh.

The $110/$115 price was definitely set too early, before Lumintop knew how much the light would cost to produce as well as ship. Texas_Ace has already confirmed they lost money on those orders.

High shipping costs was not the big delay in the group buy. It was the very slow reflector production. The stupid reflector company said “Yeah, give us the contract and we will crank them out lickety split.” Only they couldn’t. After rejecting the bad ones, it only came to 125 to 150 reflectors per week. This is still causing a slow down.

High shipping costs did push certain orders to the back of the list, like registered mail orders and remote area addresses. Were these 235 or so orders delayed? I think they did take an extra week or two so they could figure out the packages and how to best send them. So I guess certain orders did get delayed a little. Still, the biggest delay, by far, was the reflectors.

You really think we designed the whole light? Everybody here knows it was a joint effort. We came up with ideas, Lumintop was the one who actually had to go from ideas to reality. That is a huge amount of work we did not have to deal with.

Do you really think the $8,250 worth of deposits actually helped pay for tooling and to start production? That is a drop in the bucket compared to the huge financial investment to make these lights. That deposit money was simply to prove people wanted to buy this light. It helped persuade Lumintop to go forward with production. That’s all.

Assuming the Group Buy is finished by June(?) and they release it to the public at $165 plus shipping, they might have their initial investment paid off by 2019. (This is based on facts and figures talked about in private in case someone is going to ask me how I came to this conclusion) This really sucks for them. At this point in time I’m sure they consider the GT a failure. They just have you stick it out and eventually it may prove a success.

I does suck that they sold some lights before the GB was finished, but it definitely makes a difference whether it was 1 or a 1000. If they sold a 1000, it would push back the GB by 7 to 8 weeks. If it was 1 light, it would have no effect at all.

A slap in the face? Emotions and business do not go together. They are running a business. I don’t think we have a written contract preventing them from selling to the public before the GB is over. It is all a handshake deal as we try and work together. Technically they can sell them if they want. We can’t sue them to stop. When they sold them on the side in the past, we found out, told Neal or Lumintop management and they stopped it. If they are starting to sell again, let’s see if management will stop them again. Lumintop management “seems” to be honoring the deal of not selling until the GB is over even if some of their employees do not.

The request for more money from g_sintornillos is indeed strange. We need to get more info before we assume the worst.

TA has already said why our partnership with Lumintop is so important. We definitely could not just switch to another manufacturer like you’re suggesting.

I also have my light and don’t work for Neal, Lumintop or BLF Forum. I’m trying to be neutral about things.

And there is the one that gave me the rude mark for speaking my mind in a civilized manner

“I also have my light and don’t work for Neal, Lumintop or BLF Forum. I’m trying to be neutral about things.”
Yet has not been involved in the team from the beginning, yet speaks as if he was one of the original team members

Eh, I’m not even phased any more.

That is not even close to the 650 orders ($100,000) they will get over about a weeks time when the last batch of PM’s go out.

The sooner they can get all the issues sorted from the first 850 sales (missing or damaged items, etc…), the sooner they can get serious money rolling in.

It wasn’t me who gave you a rude mark.

Thank you?

Finally got my Gtvn with CFT-90. I measured 1.535m cd. This thing is insane




Now that’s interesenting point of View of a fellow member or a business partner? So many words ,but let’s assume that you would of payed on 2december and by now,instead the light that you got,you would have a shipping number dated on 7february that ever since, is saying : preregistered,pending of deposit ,and there is nobody capable to give you a proper answer where your light is it……yes,i was about 200 on the list and payed right away but of course,you were luckier than me to have the3 light and now only see how good Lumintop/Neal has done everything (and nobody really payed you to do so)

Yes, that’s how it went. Why does that imply “You wrong”?

Me or Pulsar? You quoted us both.

If me, I think I know what you are asking. It’s just worded strangely:

If I got tired of waiting, I would ask for a refund and move on.

If the paypal protection deadline got close and I still got no response about a refund, I would move to make a dispute. Maybe a week before the protection runs out. If the light showed up during paypal dispute, I would close the dispute.

  1. on list.

Paid $14 the day I got the PM.

Paid in full Jan 12th:
Thank you for your purchase! You ordered the following item(s):
8pcs Samsung 35E x 1 - $40.50
BLF GIGAThrower (DHL) x 1 - $101.78
IMPORTANT:
Please reply to this email and send me your phone number AND the BLF username
I will ship as soon as possible or contact you if i need anything else
greetings
Neal

Got email from Neal Jan 29th requesting phone number.

Today received a TEXT MESSAGE for shipping via DHL from Hong Kong with a tracking number that says it’s already in Los Angeles, but is still also in Hong Kong.

The DHL tacking page also does not show my full mailing address in Hawaii, it only shows my name/state/zip/USA… but no street address? Is that ok?

I am hopeful!

Must of been a Bitch centering/focusing that LED. The emitter is offset to the pad and the whole board is offset to the emitter hole in the reflector, to put the emitter in the center of the reflector, WOW!

They gave you a link via the Schrödinger Tracking service? :smiley: That’s kind of bad; when they locate or actually physically handle it in either one of those locations, it ceases to exist in the other. You better hope someone sees or touches it in LA first!

There’s gotta be a smart method to do this. Perhaps you could just set up a camera or microscope stand and or a laser, then eyeball center things, add reflector+window to test it. Lots of work anyway, but then again the stock emitter is not and can not be perfectly centered either. There’s only so much you have to do or even can do. Perfect x,y centering is not even needed to achieve maximum throw, but of course good for efficiency, practicality, appearance, decent beam profile, everything else. Perfect z centering is kind of independent of x,y and several methods could be used. No way to make use of any regular centering ring part, obviously. Not as more than a shim.

I mean it’s hard to properly focus but not necessarily any harder than swapping in anything more typical if you can’t use the stock MCPCB and centering ring. It’s asymmetrical package preinstalled on an weird rectangular board, but that’s it. :open_mouth:

I don’t mean to say any less wow, that’s a definite success and some beautiful work.

The die is centered on the holes, so if you use screws to mount it then it doesn’t matter that the board is offset.
Or you could simply read the datasheet and do some measurements and use math to center the LED properly on the shelf.

So it seems like a Neal’s crush or a just a sensitive personal without empathy……

I got some “rude” too when I posted the print of the sarcastic reply of this guy I think I’m the wrong here and I did should thanks neal for his outstanding work here….

I understand that,I’m very ungrateful personal and another one was G_sintornillos how he can expected a better reply than “its expensive to send to Uruguay, so it sent to usa”……

For those who are getting problems with the shipping I will share my experience: both paypal and credit card have 180 days protection and after that you cannot place a dispute or charge back anyway, so keep an eye in this, paypal requires time and not affect the charge back which is your last attempt to get your money back!

Knowing the board or emitter Center Lines of it’s layout is one thing, laying it out on the emitter shelf by hand and then machining or drilling and tapping the hold down holes is a different matter. I didn’t see any milling machines like a Bridgeport in Vinhs work shop. where he could indicate the diameter of the heat sink and coordinately use the handles or a read out to put the holes in for the board? Unless he is having it done on the outside, he does have a buddy that owns a machine shop. Or he could of had a jig made, where all you do is drop the jig in and then drop the board into it and transfer the holes that way, either way it would have to be some what precise because just a bit off makes a really big difference with this very large reflector.

How many Big Reflectors have you tuned Enderman in a fixed head/reflector light?