Try to change what can be easily changed then bring down the hammer, there are over a thousand of us waiting while a SMALL minority want the Q8 to make their morning coffee :confounded:
What if while they are being stuffed around by us TF decide to drop our arrangement and just go into production, you will still be able to buy it, for at least double the price :rage:
For myself it is at a stage where it is what it is, either give them the go ahead or drop the whole thing.
MRsDNF, no that was a rant, but a good one and heās right. This thing can be polished until it becomes obsolete and the luster is worn off.
What I wrote pages ago, well, I take it back. It might not be the perfect light for all parties involved, but when was the last time perfection was ever achieved? Iām not a modder, but when someone writes that the light can still be modded by those who do mod lights, I have to accept that.
Would I like a perfect light? Sure, but at some point one needs to realize that we have what we have and there are diminishing returns in putting in more effort. We just donāt see the amount of effort going in to this. I have yet to see anything thatās perfect; everything is a tradeoff. Clearly the Q8 design team is beginning to get frustrated, and Iād be willing to bet the folks at TF are also but we donāt know whatās going on behind the scenes in China. At some point they might just say (in Chinese of course) āThe heck with this, Bye!ā. I would really dislike seeing that happen.
Except for the 6 minor points that someone on the team mentioned (? did I remember that correctly? And they may have already been checked on.) I think itās as good as itās going to get and thatās pretty good. As has already been written, if the retaining ring is a problem due to wear, just put some solder on it and touch it up as required. Solder is cheap, easy, and fast.
It is not quite like that yet, but Thorfire has showns signs already to want it done. But in a quite positive way: they really are willing to deliver a good flashlight it seems
Itās a $40 flashlight with about 6000 lumens & a fantastic UI.
Is it perfect, no.
Could it be made perfect, not at the price point & probably not so that every single person would be happy irrespective of price or the delay involved.
The bulk, well over 95% I would say, of people who are going to buy this light will not want to mod it.
The few that do will find a way of modding it I would have thought if they want to badly enough.
I can only speak for myself here but I say try to get the 6 minor points addressed if you can, if you canāt get all addressed donāt worry, & go for it :+1:
I remember the last $40 light group buy we had, the Cometa, & the Q8 is a far far better light than that even in itās present form & TBH I would happily take the 3 I have ordered even if they were the same as the latest protoās Tom has received at the $40 price
I recently bought a couple of the UltraFire 4L-2, 4 x XML2 SRK style lights & they were $36 each.
They are about half the output of the Q8 & the UI consists of H/M/L/blinky.
I didnāt think they were a bad light for the money & I certainly think that at $40 the Q8 is a fantastic light.
Well done The Miller & Q8 team :+1: see if you can get the 6 small points sorted then pull the trigger on production
I don't think the thousand of you(/us) are owed a thing, (and I might be seen as one of the minority you're referring to although I might object to that characterization.) If the team wants to prioritize making a ton of folks who just like to get good deals on a light happy, then then that's great. If they want to prioritize giving back to the some of the more enthiusiast who actually while being a small minority of modders, do the work that made the history of these developments, that's fine too, although none of them expect or demand it. In this case Tom E is the probably biggest one of those by far and he's on the team. In the end we're all here for fun cheering along the Miller and the team and putting up (and not even really putting up) a small amount of money to enjoy what they come up with. The rest is all just comments for them to take as they wish (sure people are going to say what interests them, what they think is best) and the Miller has (mostly, aparently it got to him now) done a great job of taking all that and still doing his thing. Actually if he ignored 100% of it and made the light his way, that's fine. If he got distracted for 5 years in search of the perfect light, that's fine. He doesn't owe any of us anything. I'm not sure what the us vs them stuff is about. There's no fight here. You're not the first person to argue as if the masses shouldn't be outweighed by a few. There's no should or shouldn't to it, just what the the team wants to do. That's it.
The Miller, relax, you're fine. Whatever you do, or don't it's fine. If you quit now and say you just don't have time for it, it's fine and you've moved a neat concept forward. We're all just enjoying the trip and you've done great.
Ok, makes more sense now. Weāre nowhere near the limits of the part but of course we donāt have a heatsink on it so it all comes down to how much heat the FET can shed through the driver and the Vf curve of the LED.
I wrote a little rant and tried to do so with a little humor to show we are doing our best and well do convey all concerns.
It was this remark that got me:
combined with questions or remarks that have been both addressed and conveyed.
I started this project with an empty thread stating āletās force them to make a good quality soda can lightā later added āworthy of modding and where possible the most mod friendly choices are madeā
I think that the latest proto fits the goal already.
When we started people actually paid $100 for a highly modded Supfire M6 doing about the same as the Q8 without all the cool things Narsil has to offer.
Playing with the expensive Nitecore TM06S I know the current Q8 proto is already better
And yet despite Thorfire wanting to go ahead and start mass production we said āno, this and that needs changing and this should be taken into consideration.ā
As for modding, I think a Q8 is a much better platform for modding then the typical SRK clone despite some construction choices.
We now have to see how engineering reacts and what actually gots changed, as always, it is done when it is done
The Miller, I am one of those whole will in most probabilty do nothing more than charge the batteries periodically. To me, getting a light of this caliber for ~$40 is just amazing. It is a credit to the folks on the team for moving this forward in a way that would not be possible otherwise. It is a credit to YOUR incredible patience and unending , well almost unending, sense of humor, that we are still pursuing completion of the light. For what it is worth, i agree with bella-headlight, as quickly as possible resolve the remaining points or move on if that becomes an issue. i do not believe any one of those is a go, no-go issue. just wondering if this goes on much longer we will be asymptotically approching the point of no return for all the effort. Remember this is the budget light forum not the perfect light at all costs forum. I see our goal in my headlights, err flashlights so lets move forward not sideward or backward.
This is just such an amazing place to be able to accomplish this group buy!
Sighā¦ā¦ā¦ If your very long semi comical essay was aimed at me, I edited it down to the pertinent parts.
I had a concern/thought and voiced it for considerationā¦. nothing more than that.
No āblameā was place nor any demands being made.
I do not care if the light has a ring, screws, or bubble gum holding the driver in place.
I do not plan to āmodā it in any way, āso I personallyā do not give a rats rear end if it is āmod friendlyā or not.
What I do care about is durability and longevity. I would assume most of the other 1000 + people on the list care about the same thing.
A concern was mentioned about driver ground ring wear from the battery tube. I mention the durability issueā¦. cause from what I understand, no one knows for sure what the durability of that will actually be.
So if it was my post that pushed you over the edge, my sincere apologies.
Your message as well as suggestions are understood loud and clearā¦ā¦. :+1:
.
hmm, durability and longevityā¦
If that is the main concern forget ground ring wear, we are having 4 XP-Lās here running at about 6 amps each, way over specs, pretty close to the death current. They may or may not be gone before the ground ring has worn away and can not be repaired with three blobs of solder.
But luckily, durability and longevity was only the second goal, the first is performance!! :party:
I have been following this amazing thread for a while now. I must confess that I thought The Miller was a guy with ice water in his veins. It is good to see that even he has a limit to his patience. If I had spent as much time as him and others had on this light, which is his hobby and therefore does not put food on the table, I would not have lasted nearly as long as him with the knit picking of others for this project. I, for one, am in awe of your patience Miller! I personally think what we have now is going to be an awesome light, the more small issues that individuals have with this light requires tons of time to fix, especially when the fixes will only change the light a tiny amount. Guys no light is perfect and I think the blf Team has done a great job and small issues aside, we should give it a green light. Just my two cents, I have not contributed anything to this light, but if those who have worked hard on it are satisfied then I am too. Thanks for all your work!
Iāll just do my Q8 driver āsomewhatā like this one of strangoās and āLet The Big Dog Eatāā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦
Any possibility of a wear issue solved up front.
.
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Ok - while waiting to hear back from ThorFire, I just did 100 trials of hard tightenings of the tube. Takes just a 1/4 turn or so, cranking down on that outer edge of the driver, as hard as I could reasonably do. The 100 trials took just 2 1/2 minutes, but my forearms feel it. The wear area expanded - now there's a long section between the 2 screws making contact. Hard to say if/what damage, but looks like just a silvery color finish of a sliver - expected. Maybe later or this eve, I'll try 200-400 more trials. Sure the contact markings are not perfectly evenly distributed - could have been me in the frequent dis-assembly/re-assembly, maybe some glue fragment got under the edge of the driver - dunno. Naturally, the wear marks will distribute more evenly over time, I would expect, as the high spots get worn or pushed down. Can also take pics later, and remove the dirver and check for an issues contacting against the shelf on the head.
To me, not looking bad so far, considering the pressure - I didn't go easy on it. There's probably 25-50 more tightenings on it before this, so ~150 total.
As I said before if this design sticks, I'd like to see them simply beef up the thickness on that ground ring, and then it would probably last the life time of the light. Keep in mind the nice square threads - maybe a little stiffness there, but overall feels real nice threading up. Reminder that proto #1 did not have square threads and I sure don't want to lose them on falling back to the proto #1 design. I wouldn't think the UltraFires would have square threads like this, and don't think the SupFire M6 has them either. Also when fully tightened, it's got a bite to it which I like - keeps the assembly secured.
Hahaha though I like beer a lot, my pic is a glass of āBlanc de blanc brutā
And with another day of 30Ā°C in the sun I made our first āEaster cocktailā (bunch of freshly picket Daiseys and Dandelion, honey, fresh lemon juice, vodka, egg white of egg one or our chickens laid today and ice cubes put in the blender with a few drops of bitter on the foam.) Drank it with wife and neighbors in the sun (gained more respect for our cat, he saw the two big dogs of our neighbors (husky and similar sized black one), didnāt back down, no he attacked them and drove them off, kind of funny since the dogs didnāt know how to react.
So yeah now the alcohol content of my blood is too high to even try to be funny
Off to bed, maybe catch Barry on Skype after waking, an advantage of getting up early
Where did I say I was owed anything ??
If you object to a simple over exaggeration aimed at no one in particular that āas they sayā is your problem.
I have never stated that āthe teamā are not doing a great job so where did that come from ??
And as far as āthe few outweigh the needs of the manyā sheeeesh
?
MRsDNF, no that was a rant, but a good one and heās right. This thing can be polished until it becomes obsolete and the luster is worn off.
