So, first things first: if the set that you got form us does not meet your needs you can return it, assuming that it is still in good condition which it sounds like most are. Please send an email to John (don't want to post the whole address because he is going to get spammed to death by bots, but its John at our primary domain (X-Laser)) .com) who will give you return shipping instructions and we will happily send you a check once we get them back.
Karl, your venom is misplaced. Of course we will take care of issues, that’s just how we conduct ourselves. It does not take being scolded for us to do the right thing. By the way, if “some fool” is doing something unsafe with ANY laser product, ours or otherwise, please take whatever steps you feel are appropriate to remedy the situation. Certainly we would not want our product being misused.
The issue here for us was simply one of internal communication - and that accounts for virtually every issue. It was not willful or scandalous - it was simply procedural as I will explain.
We have never been set up to sell parts, we are setup to sell products - and there is a big difference. People ask us all the time about selling parts and we always politely decline because our internal procedures for putting out a quality product all rest on a carefully established series of steps that everyone knows, and can be double checked. When we do something ad hoc, things fall apart as was the case here, and for that I personally apologize.
When we build a laser, or get ready to launch one to market, the sample has passed through a half dozen hands. There are meetings, long email conversations, schedules made, procedures created, tests done and everyone signs off. Its a whole big production before the first unit leaves the door. To borrow a phrase from Kvant, “We’re not perfect” but we put a lot of effort into trying to be great at it.
In this case however, we had an idea about how to make some of our inventory available for folks who needed it. It was a 3 minute meeting when someone popped into my office with an idea to help out the PL community that needed complete sets, we had an amp and extra scanners, and so it seemed like a great and straightforward thing to do.
But as we discovered, not having a half dozen sets of eyes on it, rigid QA procedures, meetings and tests leads to inconsistencies. Please bear in mind that this is not one or two people handling things end to end, this is a good sized team and that makes internal communication a good deal more difficult - especially when doing things that seem ‘simple.’
The specs I had said the set would do 30K nicely with good linearity. The specs were not annotated that they had been created when we were working with the 3mm mirrors. That would have been caught during tuning if the person doing the tuning knew that the goal was to make the ILDA test pattern spot on at 30K. Their goal was to get the best tuning possible out of the set - without any particular benchmark in mind because no specific benchmark had been set during our normal resale product development cycle - because these were never really developed for resale and each individual customer specification is developed independently. An order was received, was sent to accounting, it was passed to production, and it was then passed to shipping.
Adam said that the sets could come with the film and instructions for tuning. That’s what he posted, and that’s what we were going to do. However, without the meetings and such, the front office never knew to make a formal sub-assembly list in our accounting software of what was supposed to go in the box. Accordingly, the shipping guy was never alerted that something was missing… so when he got scanners, cables, an amp and an address, on it went.
All of this is not meant to be an excuse, it is just the facts and in the end this ended up being much more complicated than we expected. We have evolved sophisticated systems for dealing with these complexities in lasers, and we have now realized that we will need to extend some of those systems to the sale of non-laser based parts.
This has been a learning process for us, and without boring you with all of the nuances and details, I will just say that we will certainly be discussing this internally and developing a better policy for what is needed before we entertain future parts sales. All we can do at this juncture is say that we will make sure that everyone is taken care of as best we can, and do better moving forward.
We take a lot of pride in the things we make and in the way we treat people. Hopefully that message comes through as we continue to strive to do better in these new arenas.
Though as Bill noted the scanners/compact amp cannot hit the ILDA test pattern at 30K we do think that they are a solid and reliable set of gear for those who may find use for them at their current speed.