Positive Comments about Neal Zhang owner of Neals Gadgets

First time Nealer here, shipped promptly, light came in at 2weeks to the US.

hm weird, i bought a fw21 pro and chose standard shipping and it seems now its being sent with DHL ? strange since he asks 25$ to be sent with such shipping… usally it was Postnl before corona if u picked standard….

Neals Gadgets is one of my favorite shops ! Good communication ! :+1:

I appreciate this input, foresight and well… honesty. I want to buy this light bc I thought even if the numbers were over rated by 10-15% I’d still be happy. But the estimations you are predicting show something completely different, and I have no reason to think you aren’t at least close if not very close. I’ll just wait until some peaople
Post some measurements on here at least. Thanks TK.

Just today received my Lumintop X9L from Neal’s Gadgets. Very quick delivery to the UK. I was expecting it to take many days more.

Super happy with the light. Quality is very good. Zero dust specks on the reflector which seems to be something that not all manufacturers can accomplish. It seems to handle the heat well. My new favourite mini powerhouse light!

Thanks to Neal for speedy delivery of this light.

Here’s a positive comment. I just got the prototype for the GT4 in the mail!!!

All my purchases from Neal have gone well . :+1:

I hope you’re able to mod it with 4 x SST90.2 at some point. :smiling_imp:

Bought a bunch of lights from Neal - very happy for the most part.

For the X9L, yes, of course the lumens are over stated. I got ~5,000 lumens out of a modded NI40 SBT-90.2, but with a 53 mm diam head, got 245 kcd measured, but it's rated at 220 kcd. The NI40 is rated at 5000 lumens, so actual results measured (manufacturer's lumens, not Maukka) were very close with the NI40.

For the X9L, 164 kcd may be a bit over stated, but for a 40 mm head diam, not off by all that much. 105 kcd sounds too low for me.

40 mm --> 53 mm

164 kcd --> 245 kcd

or

105 kcd --> 245 kcd

I dunno, didn't do the math - not sure how to do it.

I’m not sure what the correct method is, but I can at least described what I did.

I estimated the area of each reflector as the area of the outer diameter minus the area of the inner diameter… so if a reflector is 50mm across, but has a 20mm cutout at the center for the LED, that would be circle_area(50) - circle_area(20)… or about 1963 mm^2 - 314 mm^2 = 1649 mm^2.

# diameter of a circle to its area
circle_area = lambda x: math.pi * ((x/2.0)**2)

I don’t recall what exact measurements I used, but it was based on photos of each reflector and pixel measurements. The light I compared it to is a Noctigon K1-SBT90.

So, just napkin math… but I subtracted the inner hole. And the hole was pretty wide due to the large LED being used, so it hurts the smaller reflector more than it might initially seem. In the example above, increasing the diameter from 50mm to 67.8mm is enough to double the reflector’s area.

Neal kindly provided a refund within five minutes after asking via Facebook Messenger a few days ago.

RRT01 Raptor must have sold out quickly. I ordered it on the 18th of June. Neal placed another order with JETBeam. 5 weeks later, they still hadn’t sent him stock.

Early recipients reported that RRT01 Raptor NW is closer to 70 CRI instead of 90+ CRI on Nealsgadgets:
“Choose your preferred CRI (color rendering index) with your choice in LED: the CREE XP-L offers 80+ CRI while the Nichia 219C is 90+ for vivid color accuracy.”.

JETBeam told him NW is 90+ CRI. I asked JB to confirm via email, and they said it’s 70 CRI.

Here’s a weird one… I ordered 3 new lights from Neal on 22 August and got an email on 28 August (12 days ago) that they shipped. However, when I checked the tracking info it said “HONG KONG - HONG KONG SAR, CHINA, Returned to shipper” I emailed Neal on 4 Sept, asking if there was a problem. No response… I emailed him again yesterday (8 Sept) and still no response.

First buying experience with him was great but not so good this time around

Checking Photon Master’s post: I see you are located on Mars. Shipping by rocket might take some time. :laughing:

In my experience, everything I’ve ordered from Neal arrived, and usually quite quickly. However, some notes:

  • If an item was out-of-stock on order, shipment would be delayed until Neal got it in stock. No notice would be sent of the delay, but I could sometimes find out about it by PM’ing him on BLF.
  • Sometimes the tracking information lags way behind the actual delivery status. I’ve received shipments in California that were still marked as being in China.

Haha yeah Olympus Mons is beautiful this time of year. Only bad part is seeing updates on this thread 3 minutes 51 seconds after everyone else (:

Thanks for the info on the PM for Neal. I’m sure it’ll be all good. Like I said, he was great to order from last time and helped me pick out batteries etc

I have also had tracking notifications severely lag the actual location of my order form Neal, where I received my order in CT, USA and tracking still had it in China. Great Surprise though! Shipping times have gotten a lot better over las 6 months i’ve noticed. Neal has been great on all of my orders. Only hiccup was I ordered 3 black deep carry fw3a pocket clips when they came out (i think) in March or April, but I received three chrome pocket clips. I never messaged Neal about it so I didn’t really give him the chance to make it right. Wasn’t that big of a deal. I still buy from him almost monthly.

Looks like it was those idiots at DHL that goofed up the tracking info. Now it says my order will be here in 5 days! Whoop whoop

Update Got my lights today! Neal is still my boy… My opinion of DHL is a little lower though. Those clowns need to fix their tracking website.

The Nightwatch NSX3 and NSX4’s are wicked… They don’t seem to get hot even on turbo for a minute or so. I love my Lumintop FW21 Pro and the Imalent lights but man those puppies get hot fast.

Only thing was my Amutorch ES3 didn’t come with the battery I ordered. Such a small deal that I’m not even that concerned about it. Although, does anyone know a good 20350 battery to get?

Very hard to find. iJoy sells them and saw them for like $19 on eBay, $6 to $7 else where, but else where has no stock. Wonder if Neal/Amutorch ran out of them.

A 21350 would actually fit - same head/tube width as the full E3, but no one makes a 21350 I know of.

Haha what a pain in the bum huh? All these different size cells… Here’s one for $15 that I might buy if I don’t find anything cheaper https://batteryvape.com/batteries/20350-batteries/

Just bought two 25 amp iJoy 20350’s on ebay for $25 w/ free shipping. not bad… They’re coming Saturday so I’ll report back to let you guys know if they work well