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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Birger Lens Mount Reservations

Chris Swinbanks said:
Erik... shipping schedule updates, PLEASE!!!!!
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I think we have sent a "your mount is ready for shipment" email to everyone that has asked for a mount to be shipped in advance of the Impero. If we missed anybody please let us know. Out of this group, whose accounts are current, will get their tracking numbers by Monday or Tuesday. If we missed anybody that wanted a partial shipment, please email Amy.

Building is going well. Though we did discover yesterday, that we were about to be short one custom plastic part, and the molder is doing me a favor ($$) and running our tool on Friday or Monday.

All warranty agreements have been processed and returned. If you did not yet get an acknowledgement (signed agreement) back, please resend.

I am leaving Curt alone for a few days to wrap up so I do not know when my next shipment from him is. We are just going to keep building mounts until we have Imperos to match up for shipment.

A fair amount of time has been spent supporting Jay with the video. He seems to be having a good deal of fun with this. I think it is time well spent, as the collimation discussion we had, boiled down into a video, is going to be the last time I ever have to speak on the subject...:sick:

I spoke to Element today regarding the EVF mount and antenna issue. There are a bunch of easy solutions for this - Stephen and I just want to make sure we also give people a great solution.
 
birgerEngineer said:
I think we have sent a "your mount is ready for shipment" email to everyone that has asked for a mount to be shipped in advance of the Impero.
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Initially I had asked to hold until the knobs were ready but then a few weeks later followed up and said "NO PLEASE SHIP ASAP" I didn't get a "mount is ready" and got no response from my e-mail.


birgerEngineer said:
If you did not yet get an acknowledgement (signed agreement) back, please resend.
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E-mailed a PDF once, and I faxed and E-mailed a second time. I have yet to get an acknolegement back or a response to my e-mail asking if you've received it.

I sent it to Info [at] birger dot com

My deposit was charged and I did get an initial e-mail as well as a call from you when the S#!&t hit the fan with warranty issues, an am honestly very patient and excited to get the mount--I just don't seem to be getting in the loop!
 
birgerEngineer said:
I think we have sent a "your mount is ready for shipment" email to everyone that has asked for a mount to be shipped in advance of the Impero. If we missed anybody please let us know.
Click to expand...

I didn't get an email. I did ask back last Aug. to ship everything together (meaning with the Birger- not Impero) but as the delays continued I requested to ship the mount asap.

I will send an email requesting the mount be shipped in advance of the Impero.
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
Joe, another alternative:
Michael, I regret that I have to contact you in public on this forum, but I am out of options as E-mail and Phone messages have been unsuccessful to date. We are very excited to get the product we put our deposit down on in Dec of '08 and would be extremely grateful if you could let us know a status on said order. As you can imagine with any high ticket item (And as seems to be a issue on this thread sometimes) a lack of communication can be a stressful thing.

Please feel free to conact me by phone or email, or leave a number where I may contact you within the next 48 hours.

I know you are upset Joe, but I can almost promise you your letter will not have it's intended effect. The letter above would.

Jay
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Thanks for your input Jay and you may be right, but I won't take up any more space here.
joe
 
Erik,

Thanks for your P.M. and I owe you an apology.

Your e-mails have been filtered by Yahoo Mail Spam protection and I found your messages in my spam folder.

Since your e-mails came didn't come from the info account, it was not in my address book. You might want to consider sending big e-mails from the info account--one people are likely to have in their address books, so agressive filters don't remove your e-mails.

Again, sorry to have missed your original e-mails, and assuming they weren't sent or fell through the cracks. I guess they did fall through the cracks--mine!!!

RndmAxess, you might want to check out your Spam file.
 
In response to Joe's post here and on the bubble blowers thread I am quoting that response below.

Thanks, Jay for the support - I probably would have felt better with your version, but Joe has a right to be upset, and as I say in my response maybe this time it will be for the best.

The only thing I can tell you guys is that "this shit ain't easy". Small manufacturing has always been hard, but has gotten even harder over the past 25 years that I have been doing it.

In general things have gotten even more hectic, JIT (Just in time) inventory and manufacturing theory has taken over but it leaves little or no room for error. And Dollars and margins have gotten smaller YET people's expectations have gotten higher. The internet enables instant communication but also creates instant competition (whether real or vaporware) and therefore FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). For example where's the Alesniak smart mount? What happened to the ET Canon smart mount Jim announced? And this pressures more experienced ones - not always knowingly - to present what probably is the best case scenario rather than a more realistic projection with a fudge factor.

And someone like ET gets accolades for being so customer service responsive, but generally people don't realize how fundamentally different their business (not to mention their pricing structure) is from what Birger does or what I do. I don't want and don't have time to explain - but it is different.

And what really gets frustrating to me is how as a microbusiness sometimes my service is great and sometimes it is pretty poor as in Joe's case. Because we are so small it just kind of depends on the situation at that particular time. They are dozens of people that would tell you how appreciative of the great deal of time I took to explain the various camera, lens, etc. options (which we make nothing on) and many customers that could attest to how many hours I have spent explaining to them the ins and outs of dome port optics/focus changes, white balance or whatever - all after the sale. And sometimes the next guy suffers, because things get delayed or we get pressured on that particular day, week, or month. (And don't even think about whatever goes on in our personal lives)


Joe Shemesh said:
Hi Michael,
It's incredibly frustrating to try and get your attention this way, but since you don't seem interested in replying to repeated e-mails and phone messages (even though as a customer we paid you US10,000 back in early December 2008) this will hopefully serve as a warning to others. Your total disregard to repeated inquiries regarding delivery of our purchase is nothing short of astounding. We sent you monies in good faith - now get your
F?????G act together and at least have the balls to get in touch with us and let us know what the hell is going on with our delivery!!!
Since it's inception, REDUSER has helped bring together a tight community of like-minded professionals who's dealings are always in good faith, don't take it upon yourself to destroy this reputation!!!

Joe Shemesh
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Joe:

My apologies for the delays and lack of responsiveness, there is no good excuse - this should have happened quite a while ago and I will get this taken care of in the next few days.

Not an excuse, well, maybe it is, but by way of explanation, since this is now on a public forum:
1) I got married November 13th so with the moving/integration of two families things have been even a little more disorganized than usual,

2) You changed the order from the proforma invoice that I had sent, from an aluminum housing to a PVC housing and because you added the glass dome option the dollar amounts came out about the same on the wire transfer and I didn't even realize the change for a little while. I had several aluminum units nearly ready at the time we originally spoke and have actually delivered those a while ago to a couple of other customers that ordered about the same time, but no PVC units were on hand (other than the used one I sold Sebastian).

3) I had decided to go to the thicker wall PVC that is about the same thickness as the aluminum so I had to order that since I didn't have a long enough piece on hand for the RED housing.

4) Then it turned out I needed to make a slightly different set of mountplates because the ID is just slightly different than the aluminum and the height wasn't right for the standard lens position and, while it was fairly easy to setup and put a slightly different hole position on the normal frontplate because it is cut from just one side out of a large disc that already has the threaded hole in it so it is just setting a different center position in the program, I can't do that on the glass dome plate because it is a very complicated setup and has to be machined from both sides, so I have to make the mountplates fit the frontplate rather than the reverse. None of this is huge stuff, but it takes some time and setups on the CNC, etc. and wanting to make multiple parts for more of the PVC units to be somewhat efficient, AND there were a couple times where I said "let me take a day or two to get this other guys aluminum housing finished and out the door and then I can focus"
5) Production work gets fairly disjointed during the week because I also have to spend a lot of time on the phone with sales calls, or questions, daily Birger mount updates, etc. (and I honestly was on the phone with another overseas call yesterday when you called). Usually I can take the weekends to catch up and actually get things done, but with the recent marriage I have been trying to be a little more of the family man on the weekend.

6) As you know Birger mounts are actually starting to ship, but the knob situation is still delayed and also the new standard knob setup isn't that great for our underwater stuff so I decided to go ahead and make our own control circuit board (I made a brief pre-announcement about this on the birger thread a couple days ago.) And I decided to make this a crash priority for two reasons: first because a lot of current owners plus most of the new ones (including you Joe I believe) are pretty desperate for the Birger mount to work in their housings and second: because a long time friend that is an excellent hardware/software guy that has made boards for me in the past just got downsized out his job and I wanted to seize the opportunity to get this done while he was available. We are finished with my part and it goes to the circuit board manufacturer next week, so I can refocus on getting housings done.

Small, semi-custom manufacturing is quite a juggling act and I dropped the ball on your order. But I promise your housing is now the priority, and apologize for the neglect.

I'm a little bummed that this became public, but maybe it is for the best. My service and support has been very up and down over the last year (really the last couple years with the divorce/life changes). And things have been compounded with the RED housings because besides the normal changes that happen early in the development, there were several things we expected to happen quicker that altered various orders (in particular the birger mount which for a year was shipping "next week") and made things more difficult.

So, to Joe and to my other customers, I apologize but also assure you that I'm not out to screw anybody and things usually get worked out reasonably. My life is settling down quite a bit and I really expect things to run a lot smoother in the future.

And we just finished another run of our SuperNova lampheads (which I had put off for over a year) which make a really nice compact, highpowered (250 and 350 watt) package for the RED housing as well.

The AquaVideo RED housing design as it is now has come together pretty well - compact size with a great deal of flexibility. Whether you choose PL, nikon, or Canon EF lens solutions I don't think you will find anything that performs substantially better at any price, and then when you consider price I think the choice is a no-brainer. We have delivered about 20 units over the past, year so it hasn't been all bad, and I will work hard to make sure that as we move forward delivery is more consistent.
 
UW Housing

UW Housing

Thanks for your post Michael and apologies for my outburst. I had reached the end of my tether, more importantly, ran out of excuses to give some of my long-standing clients - as to why I wasn't getting their work done.
Just wanting to move on, receive our housing and turn out some beautiful RED pictures.

joe
 
From the Bubble blowers thread.

Joe Shemesh said:
Thanks for your post Michael and apologies for my outburst. I had reached the end of my tether, more importantly, ran out of excuses to give some of my long-standing clients - as to why I wasn't getting their work done.
Just wanting to move on, receive our housing and turn out some beautiful RED pictures.

joe
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Thanks for your understanding, I owe you a BIG beer whenever we meet.

BTW for those of you that might be (understandably) a bit concerned about ordering, I did ship 3 of the aluminum housings that month (so I wasn't just sitting on my hands) that were farther along. We had been selling mostly aluminums at that point. It had been several months since selling a PVC unit and the combination of PVC with the Glass dome (which is BTW a very smart economic choice. The PVC housing with glass dome is about the same as an aluminum with acrylic port) - where the glass dome frontplate can't be easily altered for a different lens height - threw me for a bit of a loop.

PS circuit boards for the simple birger mount iris/focus/etc. controller should be in early next week. Probably a week or two for testing but it is pretty simple so don't expect many issues.

Joe gets one for half price...

Picture shows basic layout in a small waterproof case. Waterproof version will probably use toggle switches on a cable so can be placed near your hand. This board may be useful for other users as well, either as a simple controller for all functions or to control iris while you control focus with the knob or for some of the dedicated single button functions we could program.
 
Birger Mount / Viewfactor Teaser Video

Birger Mount / Viewfactor Teaser Video

I made this to establish two things:

The system is here..

The system is working.

If you start picking this video apart, then you are on your own. It's a teaser to show you what's coming. It's DESIGNED to cause you to ask questions.. NOT to furnish answers other than the two I listed above.

My voice is almost back, I hope by week's end I will start on the videos and then I will go into EVERYTHING in horrific detail:
Overview
Installation
Collimation

As well as other videos on some cool stuff from ET.

So have fun with what's here.. There is an easter egg some of you may not be aware of.. So enjoy that!

http://www.company-films.com/teaser/birgerfactor.html

Jay A Kelley
Director / Host
INFO-TECH
 
Awesome! Thanks Jay!

Awesome! Thanks Jay!

Jay A. Kelley said:
So have fun with what's here.. There is an easter egg some of you may not be aware of.. So enjoy that!
Click to expand...

The easter egg is in this video? If so I'm missing it!

I'm not sure if this video will making harder or easier to wait for the Birger/VF combo to get to me..

But I'm sure happy to see it. Wow. Great stuff.
 
Yep, there's the i-pin connector in the Birger mount. Didn't spot it at first. Only when started to collimate the mount realized it's there. Quite a nice surprise.
 
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