Robin, normal business hours, in a (likely) one man operation, overseas, with small profit margins, are whenever the small business operator can get to his large workload. Teacher’s response is not emotional, it is logical. Your consideration of a PayPal dispute is emotional. PayPal disputes should be for unresolvable situations, and not applicable here, since three viable resolutions are available. Since you asked for a refund, I’m sure you will get one.
Because I did not expect this level of sluggishness, and there are indications that this shop is ignoring other users, and I want a refund.
Have you yourself ever dealt with Neal before?? Or could it be you are basing your commentary on a few excerpts you have read from a few disgruntled customers. Have you read the tons of positive comments about dealings with Neal?
“Sluggishness”….. …. Not at all. I PM’d him this morning with my option A request and heard back in less than 5 minutes. We messaged back & forth 3 more times each about random things.
You want a refund, you’ll get it. Go ahead and do your PayPal thing… it will take you much, much, much longer to get it that way. edit to add:Not to even mention you will appear to be a ‘nut case’ since Neal has already offered a Full Refund.
Robin Dobbie wrote:
teacher wrote:
Why not just put your ‘big boy panties’ on and ask for (and get) the refund that was/is offered??
I don’t know what gave you the impression I didn’t ask for a refund. To be clear, I tried to initiate dialog on the site’s “live” chat, two emails to the address on his site, and one more to the new email address he just came up with. As to the rest of your post, you seem to be having a serious emotional response which is super hilarious.
I got that impression from your first post. If you had read closely Neal asked us to Email or PM him with our choices. He never once mentioned “live chat” to address this issue. To bad you didn’t use PM here on BLF…. you might well have received a speedier reply…. as I did.
No “emotional response” here. Just commenting on the (perceived by me) ridiculousness of your expectations, as well as you basing some of those expectations NOT on your past personal experience with this vendor….. but the experience of a few unhappy people. And do not forget, you only hear the side of the story the “unhappy people” present.
There are always two sides to every story……
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Robin, norrmal business hours, in a (likely) one man operation, overseas, with small profit margins, are whenever the small business operator can get to his large workload.
I didn’t bring up business hours. But I did attempt the live chat this morning, yesterday, the day before yesterday, at different hours that would be acceptable in china or the US. I get daily responses from other sellers in China.
Quote:
Teacher’s response is not emotional, it is logical. Your consideration of a PayPal dispute is emotional. PayPal disputes should be for unresolvable situations, and not applicable here, since three viable resolutions are available. Since you asked for a refund, I’m sure you will get one.
Eh, it’s immature at best.
If I wait until Friday night(saturday morning, technically) like I was going to, that will have been 4 days since I placed the order. You’re telling me it would be emotional to open a paypal dispute after hearing nothing from a seller after multiple attempts on multiple emails, platforms? That’s really interesting.
Buying from China isn’t for the impatient, plain and simple. If you don’t mind waiting, you’ll usually get a really nice product at an unbelievable price. And you’ll even find a few places that offer very good customer service given the circumstances, and Neal is one of the best of them.
Please feel free to state the facts here about whatever problems you’re running into with the FW3A. But please limit it to the facts, state your case (once), and leave it at that. And please avoid fighting and arguing at all costs. Thanks in advance.
It’s to bad more people, instead of just being interested in a good deal & deep discount; do not thoroughly read the OP & pay special attention to the parts such as I have quoted below.
“A word of warning for BLF specials:
The BLF part is done by BLFers who do it in their spare time, despite they may seem professionals and the work they do is at professional level, BLF is not our full time job. So give us a break and relax if thing are not going as fast as you want.
Nothing is sure so expect waiting:
- Waiting for news and updates.
- Waiting for the project to come to fruition.
- Waiting till the result can finally be ordered.
- And then waiting for arrival at your home, shipping from China can take a long time.
So relax, enjoy the many other facets of BLF while you wait and remember: It is done when it is done”
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
It already sounds like we have different experiences with this seller. You get several back and forth emails, I’ve gotten nothing at all.
Just to be clear, I never said I “emailed”. I said I “sent PM’s here on BLF”. That is most likely the difference in our experiences this morning. I got a timely response.
Robin Dobbie wrote:
Offering and providing are two different things.
Yes they are. And you can be 100% positive if Neal offers a Full Refund…. you (and anyone else) will get it.
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Buying from China isn’t for the impatient, plain and simple. If you don’t mind waiting, you’ll usually get a really nice product at an unbelievable price. And you’ll even find a few places that offer very good customer service given the circumstances, and Neal is one of the best of them.
Please feel free to state the facts here about whatever problems you’re running into with the FW3A. But please limit it to the facts, state your case (once), and leave it at that. And please avoid fighting and arguing at all costs. Thanks in advance.
I actually knew this would be coming from China… after reading this thread. It would have been better if the site said it was shipping from China. But that’s not even the issue. The issue is lack of communication, not shipping transit time.
Point taken. I will fark right off. Anyone have a discount code for bigboypanties.com?
teacher wrote:
Group Buys are obviously not for everyone.
I didn’t know this was still a group buy? I saw a YouTube video, caught the excitement of the reviewer, googled the light, read a little here, placed the order. Maybe not in that exact order. But that’s the basic playlist. I wasn’t planning on buying another flashlight. But I did, asked a question, it was ignored because everyone was talking about how bad the new optic situation was. I figured the right thing to do was cancel the order. Here we are.
Quote:
It’s to bad more people, instead of just being interested in a good deal & deep discount; do not thoroughly read the OP & pay special attention to the parts such as I have quoted below.
“A word of warning for BLF specials:
The BLF part is done by BLFers who do it in their spare time, despite they may seem professionals and the work they do is at professional level, BLF is not our full time job. So give us a break and relax if thing are not going as fast as you want.
Nothing is sure so expect waiting:
- Waiting for news and updates.
- Waiting for the project to come to fruition.
- Waiting till the result can finally be ordered.
- And then waiting for arrival at your home, shipping from China can take a long time.
So relax, enjoy the many other facets of BLF while you wait and remember: It is done when it is done”
Maybe that should be posted on the site where the lights are being sold. It sure seems like a professional site, with the exception of a lack of contact info besides an email address. I curse myself for not catching that.
Just to be clear, I never said I “emailed”. I said I “sent PM’s here on BLF”. That is most likely the difference in our experiences this morning. I got a timely response.
What the fark ever. You said, “Neal asked us to Email or PM him with our choices.” I’m saying I did as asked by doing the first thing suggested by him, emailed. …both the address on his site and the new one he made for whatever reason.
Any estimates at this point on the throw (in meters, for my simple mind) with the SST-20 and whatever optics will come with the production version?
Not yet, but I’ll be sure to measure it if I ever have a SST-20 version.
It sounds like people can still get the original optic though, if they’re willing to wait a few weeks for parts. Or for SST-20 it may be desirable to use the 10507 optic intead, to maximize throw.
Same here. Neal’s website still states that it has a glass lens with carclo optic. So guess what? If you get anything other than that, dispute charges.
If you jam Neal up by disputing charges I hope you will get banned here
TK, Beautiful colors! First post here. BTW, I ordered two lights recently and tried to contact Neal without much luck Thankfully, reading the posting above, I sent a pm from here as suggested and minutes later he got my questions answered. It is a different contact system but was easy once I took time to read here. Looking forward to learning great things and burning fingers.
I’ve been a bit busy, but I finally got a picture of the color samples. I really like how vivid the pinkish purple color is:
… and another shot with two more lights included — bare titanium and Convoy’s darker blueish purple.
The purple FW3A sample looks really good. I’m not quite sure what to call it.
Just for the fun of it, I grabbed the hex codes for most of the shades of purple listed on Wikipedia and put them beside the sample.
As far as that specific picture with it’s specific lighting and camera goes, palatinate looks quite a good match. Though HTML/CSS purple (“patriarch”) isn’t that far either.
P.S. That Convoy purple though, I don’t think I’ve seen it before. At first glance it looked a lot like web Indigo (4B0082) but after looking at it for a while it’s not quite that. Neat nevertheless.
Isn’t the SST-20 version a quad rather than tri-emitter version? If so, presumably it would need a different optic. How is it impacted by the Lumintop-Carclo situation?
TK, Beautiful colors! First post here. BTW, I ordered two lights recently and tried to contact Neal without much luck Thankfully, reading the posting above, I sent a pm from here as suggested and minutes later he got my questions answered. It is a different contact system but was easy once I took time to read here. Looking forward to learning great things and burning fingers.
Welcome to BLF! I hope you enjoy it here!!
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Isn’t the SST-20 version a quad rather than tri-emitter version? If so, presumably it would need a different optic. How is it impacted by the Lumintop-Carclo situation?
No it is not a quad. All factory FW3A’s are triples.
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Isn’t the SST-20 version a quad rather than tri-emitter version? If so, presumably it would need a different optic. How is it impacted by the Lumintop-Carclo situation?
The SST-20 version is a triple as well. Some on BLF have modded their FW3A’s to be quads, though.
The purple FW3A sample looks really good. I’m not quite sure what to call it.
Just for the fun of it, I grabbed the hex codes for most of the shades of purple listed on Wikipedia and put them beside the sample.
As far as that specific picture with it’s specific lighting and camera goes, palatinate looks quite a good match. Though HTML/CSS purple (“patriarch”) isn’t that far either.
Yep, like you said; Palatinate is a pretty good match. HTML/CSS purple (“patriarch”) is close, as is Byzantium to my eye.
Even Mardi Gras is semi-close.
Great pic for color comparison…. thanks for posting it.
—
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
I allways wanted to be able to turn off memory on FW3A ands start in fixed level of brightness. Now I see that new Emisar D4 does have this feature. Does this means I can upgrade firmware on FW3A and get that feature? Which firmware do I need? Thanks.
The latest version of Andúril has this functionality, but unfortunately it is not loaded onto the FW3As that are being shipped out right now. You can upgrade the firmware on this light easier than most due to the fact that nothing is glued in, but it will still require unsoldering two wires and dismantling the head, as well as using a few cheap but specialized tools that can be bought from China. If you feel up to it, there are people here with a lot of experience who could point you in the direction of some good guides.
I have two questions, for anyone who can answer them.
1) Is there anywhere I can buy an AR-coated glass lens for the FW3A? Neal must have them, since one of his options includes providing them with the lights, but I can’t find anything like that on his site.
2) Will the colored versions show up on Neal’s site or should I be looking elsewhere? Does anyone know when they will be available to order? Seeing pictures of batches of them makes me thing they shouldn’t be too far off and I don’t want to miss out.
I’d also like to say that while I do not have an order pending, I am impressed with the way Neal is handling this. Lumintop put Neal in a very bad spot and he seems to be doing his best to keep the rest of us from suffering for it. The delays in delivery are inevitable since the parts just aren’t available right now.
I understand why people are frustrated at not receiving better and faster responses, but given everything else that’s going on I can udnerstand why he hasn’t gotten back to everyone. I expect he has been working long hours trying to deal with the manufacturing, assembly, and delivery issues.
9pm US eastern time, is 9am his time. His hours are 9am to 10pm.
Robin, normal business hours, in a (likely) one man operation, overseas, with small profit margins, are whenever the small business operator can get to his large workload. Teacher’s response is not emotional, it is logical. Your consideration of a PayPal dispute is emotional. PayPal disputes should be for unresolvable situations, and not applicable here, since three viable resolutions are available. Since you asked for a refund, I’m sure you will get one.
“Sluggishness”…..
…. Not at all. I PM’d him this morning with my option A request and heard back in less than 5 minutes. We messaged back & forth 3 more times each about random things.
You want a refund, you’ll get it. Go ahead and do your PayPal thing… it will take you much, much, much longer to get it that way.
I got that impression from your first post. If you had read closely Neal asked us to Email or PM him with our choices. He never once mentioned “live chat” to address this issue. To bad you didn’t use PM here on BLF…. you might well have received a speedier reply…. as I did.edit to add: Not to even mention you will appear to be a ‘nut case’ since Neal has already offered a Full Refund.
No “emotional response” here. Just commenting on the (perceived by me) ridiculousness of your expectations, as well as you basing some of those expectations NOT on your past personal experience with this vendor….. but the experience of a few unhappy people. And do not forget, you only hear the side of the story the “unhappy people” present.
There are always two sides to every story……
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
I didn’t bring up business hours. But I did attempt the live chat this morning, yesterday, the day before yesterday, at different hours that would be acceptable in china or the US. I get daily responses from other sellers in China.
Eh, it’s immature at best.
If I wait until Friday night(saturday morning, technically) like I was going to, that will have been 4 days since I placed the order. You’re telling me it would be emotional to open a paypal dispute after hearing nothing from a seller after multiple attempts on multiple emails, platforms? That’s really interesting.
It already sounds like we have different experiences with this seller. You get several back and forth emails, I’ve gotten nothing at all.
edit:
Offering and providing are two different things.
Buying from China isn’t for the impatient, plain and simple. If you don’t mind waiting, you’ll usually get a really nice product at an unbelievable price. And you’ll even find a few places that offer very good customer service given the circumstances, and Neal is one of the best of them.
Please feel free to state the facts here about whatever problems you’re running into with the FW3A. But please limit it to the facts, state your case (once), and leave it at that. And please avoid fighting and arguing at all costs. Thanks in advance.
Budget Light Forum ...where Frugal meets with Flashlight!
Group Buys are obviously not for everyone.
It’s to bad more people, instead of just being interested in a good deal & deep discount; do not thoroughly read the OP & pay special attention to the parts such as I have quoted below.
“A word of warning for BLF specials:
The BLF part is done by BLFers who do it in their spare time, despite they may seem professionals and the work they do is at professional level, BLF is not our full time job. So give us a break and relax if thing are not going as fast as you want.
Nothing is sure so expect waiting:
- Waiting for news and updates.
- Waiting for the project to come to fruition.
- Waiting till the result can finally be ordered.
- And then waiting for arrival at your home, shipping from China can take a long time.
So relax, enjoy the many other facets of BLF while you wait and remember:
It is done when it is done”
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
I actually knew this would be coming from China… after reading this thread. It would have been better if the site said it was shipping from China. But that’s not even the issue. The issue is lack of communication, not shipping transit time.
Point taken. I will fark right off. Anyone have a discount code for bigboypanties.com?
I didn’t know this was still a group buy? I saw a YouTube video, caught the excitement of the reviewer, googled the light, read a little here, placed the order. Maybe not in that exact order. But that’s the basic playlist. I wasn’t planning on buying another flashlight. But I did, asked a question, it was ignored because everyone was talking about how bad the new optic situation was. I figured the right thing to do was cancel the order. Here we are.
Maybe that should be posted on the site where the lights are being sold. It sure seems like a professional site, with the exception of a lack of contact info besides an email address. I curse myself for not catching that.
What the fark ever. You said, “Neal asked us to Email or PM him with our choices.” I’m saying I did as asked by doing the first thing suggested by him, emailed. …both the address on his site and the new one he made for whatever reason.
Not yet, but I’ll be sure to measure it if I ever have a SST-20 version.
It sounds like people can still get the original optic though, if they’re willing to wait a few weeks for parts. Or for SST-20 it may be desirable to use the 10507 optic intead, to maximize throw.
Your eyes are not “Photoshopping” you, they are for real !!
So… a lot happened in the past couple days. Apologies if I missed anything. I’m just now catching up on the thread.
I’ve been a bit busy, but I finally got a picture of the color samples. I really like how vivid the pinkish purple color is:
… and another shot with two more lights included — bare titanium and Convoy’s darker blueish purple.
On that note, I updated the button logo concept image to better clarify which parts should be etched:
This is obviously just photoshopped, but the point is to clearly communicate the idea to whoever does the etching.
TK, I’m calling that one grape…
If you jam Neal up by disputing charges I hope you will get banned here
TK, Beautiful colors! First post here. BTW, I ordered two lights recently and tried to contact Neal without much luck Thankfully, reading the posting above, I sent a pm from here as suggested and minutes later he got my questions answered. It is a different contact system but was easy once I took time to read here. Looking forward to learning great things and burning fingers.
The purple FW3A sample looks really good. I’m not quite sure what to call it.
Just for the fun of it, I grabbed the hex codes for most of the shades of purple listed on Wikipedia and put them beside the sample.
As far as that specific picture with it’s specific lighting and camera goes, palatinate looks quite a good match. Though HTML/CSS purple (“patriarch”) isn’t that far either.
P.S. That Convoy purple though, I don’t think I’ve seen it before. At first glance it looked a lot like web Indigo (4B0082) but after looking at it for a while it’s not quite that. Neat nevertheless.
Isn’t the SST-20 version a quad rather than tri-emitter version? If so, presumably it would need a different optic. How is it impacted by the Lumintop-Carclo situation?
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
The SST-20 version is a triple as well. Some on BLF have modded their FW3A’s to be quads, though.
I like ‘Dark’ Purple……. even a bit darker than the Convoy Purple ….. anyone else?
Im not a Pessimist …. just an Optimist with a lot of experience
A little John Prine
No
Nope… negative on the dark purple.
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
Even Mardi Gras is semi-close.
Great pic for color comparison…. thanks for posting it.
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him up to a heavy load./"Bear" Bryant
.................................. "Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast" ...................................
Texas Lumens Flashlights / M4D M4X Deals : sign up - save $$$$
Rudeness Level _ mΩ _ {width:70%} _ LightWiki _ LED Tint Chart
Xlamp size chart _ BatteryU _ Flashaholic? Need Professional Help??? TheOriginal _ TAB _ LightSearch _ BatterySearch _ 14500's _ DiCal
Grape
Grape.crush….
I allways wanted to be able to turn off memory on FW3A ands start in fixed level of brightness. Now I see that new Emisar D4 does have this feature. Does this means I can upgrade firmware on FW3A and get that feature? Which firmware do I need? Thanks.
The latest version of Andúril has this functionality, but unfortunately it is not loaded onto the FW3As that are being shipped out right now. You can upgrade the firmware on this light easier than most due to the fact that nothing is glued in, but it will still require unsoldering two wires and dismantling the head, as well as using a few cheap but specialized tools that can be bought from China. If you feel up to it, there are people here with a lot of experience who could point you in the direction of some good guides.
I gotta tell ya, this is pretty terrific!
I have two questions, for anyone who can answer them.
1) Is there anywhere I can buy an AR-coated glass lens for the FW3A? Neal must have them, since one of his options includes providing them with the lights, but I can’t find anything like that on his site.
2) Will the colored versions show up on Neal’s site or should I be looking elsewhere? Does anyone know when they will be available to order? Seeing pictures of batches of them makes me thing they shouldn’t be too far off and I don’t want to miss out.
I’d also like to say that while I do not have an order pending, I am impressed with the way Neal is handling this. Lumintop put Neal in a very bad spot and he seems to be doing his best to keep the rest of us from suffering for it. The delays in delivery are inevitable since the parts just aren’t available right now.
I understand why people are frustrated at not receiving better and faster responses, but given everything else that’s going on I can udnerstand why he hasn’t gotten back to everyone. I expect he has been working long hours trying to deal with the manufacturing, assembly, and delivery issues.
I also have a question, is the code only valid on the SST-20s now, and no longer on the XPL?
Pages