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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 :)

VFS Inclino, Imperio, Origo News ??

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Andrew Wilding said:
Me neither, including the PM i sent CVB regrettably asking for a refund. Id prefer a FF, but my getting my money back is in a not so distant second place.
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Guys, we are not gone.. just working. Andrew... If you want a refund send the email to info@viewfactor.net, not via reduser PM. I will post an update later this evening so you guys can temporarily put down the pitch forks and torches.
 
No pitch fork here, Curt. I sincerely wish you and your company Mega-Sucess. And I really badly want one of your units!


Im just hoping that it wont be too far in the future. Ill hold off on emailing or a refund, for a little longer. Id really like to support your company if I can.
 
I said I would update tonight so here we go.... We shipped a few motors and imperos last week with the new drive train. I was happy with the performance but there was still a small click sound that I decided to nip in the butt. We are finishing up 6 sets tonight and will be sending out a few more units tomorrow. This weekend we are building up yet more units. I know a lot of you are upset about the delays and rightly so. If I didn't care about the quality of these they would have been shipped 4 months ago. I'll post a more thorough update tomorrow night regarding shipping volumes/dates.
 
CVB said:
We are finishing up 6 sets tonight and will be sending out a few more units tomorrow. This weekend we are building up yet more units.
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Hi Curt I have Order #7 ....PLEASE MAKE SURE MINE IS ONE OF THESE ONEs SENT !!!

You must send them to the order holders in order they were ordered.

I expect to hear what my tracking number is tomorrow.

Please do not send any more orders out of order. you owe us who ordered early that !!!

Regards, Tim.
 
CVB said:
Guys, we are not gone.. just working. Andrew... If you want a refund send the email to info@viewfactor.net, not via reduser PM. I will post an update later this evening so you guys can temporarily put down the pitch forks and torches.
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Man you have some balls.....as if nothing has happened.
 
Bob.H said:
Man you have some balls.....as if nothing has happened.
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Has something happened?

I must have missed it. Oh yeah, they sent out a few units.

That's better than nothing.

Cheers,
Damien

PS Better late than never...
 
Chill out

Chill out

On behalf of those of us who have been part of the RedUser community for long time I would appreciate civility on this forum.

Curt really is a great guy and impugning his motives is uncalled for. ViewFactor is not a big conglomerate with ulterior motives.

The fact that people are unhappy about the long wait and numerous delays already fills many pages of this thread. I call "piling on" and ask, please, stop it.

Cheers - #19
 
I'm with Blair on this... I look at this thread every day and it's just pages and pages of the same thing. Curt posts, people are somewhat appeased. Curt says he'll update on xxx day and usually people already have pitchforks in hand and torches lit before xxx day is even over and they're ready to crucify Curt when he finally does post a few days later.

I get it. I understand the frustration. I ordered during NAB '08, right after I hung out with Curt for several hours. That's nearly 18 months ago and I have no wireless FF system yet...

If you are unhappy and no longer willing to wait, get your refund and move on. Piling on to this thread does no good for anyone. The excuse of "warning others of the situation" is just a bunch of hoo-ha anyway, and I've seen at least three people claim that's what they're doing now over the past month. As if all 2100 something posts aren't enough already to inform any potential buyers of the situation.

Anyway, I'm getting off the soap box before people start throwing things at me.
 
Jeff, Blair. Personaly, i have had no contact with anyone from VF. That seems to make a big difference for many people who had the pleasure either at NAB or their workshop or elsewhere, and i am sure it would have made a difference to me if i had.

At the same time i have not had any reply to my personal emails sent through the VF website. I tried to keep my communication with VF off the boards but nothing is working, by the way i still have not received any correspondence from them. I have asked for a refund and not received it. The VF website has not been updated for 3 months with regards the production of the Inclinio, Imperio.

You may call it 'piling on', but the fact is there are a lot of un-happy customers, who are not being treated with respect. There is no place for those customers to communicate with VF that gets a response, apart from here.

Every now and then i come back to this thread and check what's going on, because i get nothing in my email, and all i feel is frustration. I would rather keep all this behind closed doors, as it were, and just between me and VF but they have made that impossible.

This scenario is now in danger of creating bad feeling between members of the RED community, which i have always found to be positive and welcoming. So the implications of the way this has been handled are going far deeper. I have read posts where members have the pitchforks at each other.

To suggest that anyone has been impugning VFs motives is a little dramatic, stand in everybody's shoes here guys, VFs, your own, and the other guy.

Many of us have been on this forum for a long time Blair. I really don't know what that is supposed to mean, is this an old timers gang? A competition of patience. It's all a bit passive-aggressive.

it's a 2 way street..........

Much of this could have been avoided by communication on VFs behalf. It's very simple really.
 
I don't want to get dragged into this, but purely from an observer's point of view, I think Bob H. and Leo made the most accurate account of the situation.

I mean, how much and how many times can VF mislead the customers? How can he say that products will ship tomorrow after he rewrites the software in the next hour, assembles 20 units by the afternoon, what?, fifty times in a row for the past 18 months? :icon_bs::icon_bs::icon_bs:

I think this thread alone would make for a masterpiece script for a sequal to Liar Liar with Curt replacing Jim Carrey. And, to Blair's and Jeff's points, I fully agree: both the Fletcher Reede character (Jim Carrey) and Curt seem nice, knowledgable and educated guys. Respectable? You have got to be kidding. After 2,153 replies in this thread, I don't believe a single word they say.:hand:

Is that an unfair take?
 
After a couple weeks of tweaking the design I was finally able to eliminate the last noise that has been bothering me. It was a little grueling in the shop (102 Deg F.), and it took over 20 different designs to get the profile just right where everything glides smoothly but its really really nice now. The drive train we came up with consists of four components that are very tight tolerance and if we are off by as little as .0005" things go bad ( I found that out after a lot of head scratching). The quick change collet fixtures we bought along with the $5000 in new carbide tooling is keeping everything in check and now allows us to manufacture our own drivetrain components in-house and avoid vendor delays.

We are shipping out 10 more units on Wednesday from parts we manufactured today and this weekend. We are pacing the manufacturing of the components to have all new drive train components done by the 3rd of August - keep in mind we are making over 1200 parts @ about 4 minutes/part working 20hr days so we should have 300 sets ready by next weekend. Plating takes two days which will mean final parts in our hands on the 5th of Aug. We already have the motors assembled up to the drive train and as soon as parts are back from plating we can assemble and test each motor in less than 10 minutes. This should easily yield 50-75 motors per week.

For those of you having trouble contacting us... try calling us. We DO pickup during business hours. We get tons of email and only have one person on email duty. She has to divide her time between bookkeeping and customer service. When we have the backlog of motors shipped we WILL increase our customer support staff.

One last thing I want to leave you with is that its easy to look at something after its done and forget that this stuff is not easy. Making dozens of prototypes, manufacturing electronic pcbas, motor controls, power conversion circuitry, custom motors, rotor magnetics, cycloid drives, plastic parts, and machined/die cast parts all have hundreds of design issues that pop up. Theres also hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling, parts inventory and overhead to deal with. View Factor is a small company. I am only one person. I would have loved to grabed a couple more engineers to make this all go more smoothly but $85K/yr salaried engineers or $10K/week contract engineers were not in the cards after we were a year into this endeavor. I want you all to know that I have been living in this shop for the last 8 months only leaving for a couple holidays and a wedding. The only other time I leave the shop is for food or taking a shower. Tonight is the first night in a long time where I feel very gratified about what we have accomplished as a company. When Im called a liar it really hurts. I make the best estimates that I can and things happen that I did not account for. I would agree that I am terrible at accounting for the unknowns but I have never and will never lie to you guys.
 
CVB said:
... so we should have 300 sets ready by next weekend...This should easily yield 50-75 motors per week...but I have never and will never lie to you guys.
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We all look forward to the 300 sets ready by next weekend (1 August) and 50-75 motors per week, then. :toetap05:
 
Nice one Curt. I've stayed out of this quagmire for my own sanity.

I'll be ordering soon - I for one appreciate what you are trying to bring to the community both in terms of price and performance. I think you have done the smart thing by NOT responding to all of this BS that gets thrown at you in this thread, keeping your head down and getting the job done right.

Cam
 
Curt,

Firstly, thank you for the detailed update. Starting any business is a big undertaking. I have been self employed for 23 years, and run a company.
Your customers are your bread and butter, look after them.

It sounds like you have a load on in the workshop, and have come up against some real problems along the way, making it hard to get to the computer. The result is that people ( Customers ) feel alienated.

From my experience you have failed to meet all your deadlines with regards delivery of units. So it's hard to read your posts with any confidence. I wish it were not the case.

I have purchased other kit not yet finalised, including the "smallHD" monitor, the "RED NULL", E.T KIT, and was considering the Gearnex should my trusty mitchell become to cumbersome. I have not had any cause for concern with any of these other manufacturers, even though what i bought did not yet exist. They came in with the products on time as they said they would or either i got an email stating why, and when expected delivery would be, very simple stuff,very effective and keeps me ( customer ) happy. None of this has happened with VF. Also i only paid a deposit for the RED NULL, the rest will be paid when it is ready to ship, a good philosophy. The "smallHD' i paid up front be they delivered! The gearnex website and thread is updated regularly by them, i will probably purchase at some point. So you see it works, it works for them and it would work for you.

Personlly when i buy into something i buy into the whole thing, the product, the company and it's ethos, the quality of service, the whole package. And in many ways what is more important to me is the service, i will buy one product over the other if overall package is better. They all go hand in hand.

I don't think anyone has suggested that you are an out and out liar. You seem to be a genuine and obviously very talented individual, as everyone who has met you speaks very highly of you. Pay a bit of attention to the other stuff, it will pay dividends. Avoid predicting delivery dates, until the gear is in the box, built and ready to go, or you are 99% sure the processes to put that in place are working for you. Nothing is 100% :thumbup1:

I know what it's like do 18-20 hr days, but for me it's the nature of the beast, i either accept it or get out.

Myself and numerous others have sent numerous emails and have not received replies, using the suggested email address.

Good luck curt, but if this is how your going to run things, you gotta expect some flack.
 
Great news Curt. Is it possible for to update the status VS ordernumbers? Would be nice to see how long down the line I am. (ORD200812221 BTW).

Regarding your last post I would like to say; you have my full respect (however I would like you keep us better updated than in the past).
 
One thing I d like to add.Talk directly by phone. I had call Curt 3 times in the past and that was a long distance call from Greece and all of the 3 times I got a responce from them they answered all of m questions.This is much easier than emails and you get an answer back in no time.
Call the guys.
Constantine
 
Joe Shemesh said:
Curt, what's with impero units please?? days, weeks or months away??

best
joe
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We have Imperos reserved for the Inclinos that we are going to be shipping. We just pulled the trigger on another batch of 275 units last week... were expecting to have them ready by the end of next week or the week after. To date we have shipped about 150 Imperos, a large portion of which are in Eriks hands for the Birger mounts.
 
Hi,
what do i have to do to make my Impero/Birger work with the Inclinos? Just buy a receiver and i'll be ready to go?
 
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