I still say, when and if the Proto is approved, they should send out 20 or so units first to get a feel what the production units will end up like. If they end up having some problems, it’s a lot easier to fix 20 units, and address any changes in production and QC, than it is to have 1000+ units out in the wild with problems.
I’m not talking about sending out 20 free flashlights, just picking 20 or so volunteers to pay, receive the light, and report back. Then if all goes well, let it fly. I’d volunteer for the cause.
This is the UltraFire 4-L2 I bought to play about with & get a feel of a soda can type light until the Q8 was available.
It is the same head & tube dimensions as the Q8 so they are pretty standard on this style of light, but 15mm longer at 150mm, due to the raised lip on the tail cap for the lanyard slots.
It was $36 so nearly as much as the Q8 but not as much output at 3300 lumens on start up on 30Q”s & only 3 modes H,M,L.
It has onboard USB charging & displays battery status via the numbered readout going from 9 down to 1.
I really like this light but with the greater output & much better UI the Q8 at $40 will be a real steal :+1:
At 30 seconds it has dropped to around 3000 lumens at a minute I don”t know as I haven”t measured it but can do later on today.
On high it gets warm but not uncomfortably hot.
It pulls about 10A on high.
Mitko recommended this light to me as being the best stock budget “SRK” type light out there at the moment.
Being aware of all the poorly built, fake emitter SRK type lights out there I had been reluctant getting one but went with his recommendation.
He was correct :+1:
It does have genuine XML2”s & a better than average build quality.
Myself & Teacher have one each & we are very very pleased with them.
I expect the Q8 to blow it away in all departments though
Hopefully TF understands the value of the suggestion from RobertB. Rather than being one of those anxiously anticipating the opportunity to fine tune the proto, I am at the other end of the food chain. Being an early adopter has never appealed to me, I would rather take advantage of a mature and ‘fine tuned’ design. Shipping roulette and adjustments are less interesting to me. I have survived until now without the Q8, happy to wait for my 5 x Q8.1s, Q8.2s or whatever, enjoying the fruits of other more qualified evaluators. I am here for the learning experience more than anything else.
Yeah, 20/1000 does seem like a small sample size. It wouldn’t be enough to ensure quality throughout the entire run of 1000+ lights. If we do ask for a production sample, it should be a larger number of lights. But, it’s going to slow things down quite a bit in the production facility if we do that.
However, the way I would ‘count’ whether they were production samples (versus prototypes) would be whether they were made in a production run. You set up the line and make multiple lights, all the same. And all the lights that are made in that run, whether it is a run of one day or a week, constitute a lot. If you take some of those lights and ship them out, then those are a production sample. A prototype is, generally speaking, run down the line by itself. The work stations have to be set-up to make that one light, then changed to another set-up to make something else. It is a lot size of one piece. There’s no continuity.
Yeah idk how production goes and doubt if we ever know.
In my mind I see big machines doing lots of automated work like chip placement, flowing, cncing.
Then I guess they have a machine for making of housings for test samples so a new light and prototype work won’t interfere with general production
Feeding, programming and working the real production machines doesn’t seem logical for just 20 or even 100 so I guess (guess!) a smaller run as test would be made how prototype and internal test samples are made thus won’t be comparable to the actual production.
Based on this I think next steps are:
Waiting on proto V2
If correct, proto V2/3 production for the teammembers , packaging tests and reviewing of those.
If good (we have a batch of 7 then) and confirmed that before shipping - right after making each light - the QC test we specified (actual turning on so DOA problems can’t happen and mistakes can be fixed directly) is conducted we can move forward and make it available. It would be the most thoroughly executed ramp up to a BLF special like this IMHO.
Proto2 looks sweet. I’m still not getting email updates; I was 75 posts behind in this thread this morning :rage:
I doubt TF will want to do any ‘beta test’ lights unless they’ve got some open production time which they probably do not. It wouldn’t hurt to ask anyway As long as the prototypes are being made on their production machines, the CNC aspect should ensure that production closely matches the proto’s. But if the proto is mostly hand-made there could be some considerable differences. If they do extra QC on the first batch and those are all good, then the rest should follow suit.
Gotta remember that TF is doing this “on the cheap” for us and we’re getting a heck of a lot from them already
From the scarce information that we get from Thorfire, reading between the lines, I get the impression that they get a heck of a lot from us as well, so we are doing good on both sides with the Q8 project.
It took me a couple tries, but Google got me a link for Ian’s UltraFire 4-L2 above from FastTech. Built in charging is via a 4.2Vdc at 1A barrel jack rather than the slightly more standard 5 Vdc USB micro. Given the very specific voltage on the adapter, I wonder if the charging circuit is simply ‘apply adapter voltage to batteries.’
So you’re saying that 20 or 30 units wouldn’t be enough to get a good idea, but 7 would? I’m not trying to throw a wrench into the process, but how many times have we seen full production turn into a complete clusterf ? It’s going on right now with the TF VG10. I don’t doubt they can meticulously make 2 or 7 lights by hand. My concern is when they turn loose the entire production run and some machinist has his boring machine set to the wrong spec (like the vg10), and they decide to build them anyway because the profit margins are too small to re-mill the entire run.
I’d even be willing to pay an extra 2 dollars to the price of each of these lights to fund one of the “team members” to go over to china and over-see production for a few days as an insurance policy, if doing a test run of 20 or 30 units isn’t possible.
Anyway, just thinking out loud. I don’t know of any company that doesn’t run through a production test before going into full production.
I don't see the difference - if they can/can't do one right, then seeing if they do 20 right/wrong won't make a difference in how the 1000+ piece run turns out. As we all know, we've seen differences in quality from one batch to another, so the 20 could simply be batch #1. The quality control aspect has been emphasized from day one on this project to ThorFire, so the Miller has done his best to ensure this. We want samples to approve from the 1000+ batch run, not a 20 pre-production run.
Hi, I just signed up for a blf account today and would like to get on the Q8 list for one unit. I have the a6 and it has been my daily driver since it came out. It was a gift and I haven’t found a better edc. Great job guys!
I’ve read the “Quality” section several times. but never mind, we’ll see what happens. Hopefully nothing of significance will, since TF’s future will depend on it.
