Thank you for your thorough reply.
While I have expressed some sympathy for your situation, lauded my now working one of two GHs performance, and certainly have expressed hope and best wishes for new design changes to be effective and for your production plant to get back quickly to operation, I just have to throw the BS flag on the SS cases....which you STILL have on your site for sale.
I'm just not buying it. You are not a machine shop and I speculate that you couldn't possibly produce these yourself even though its really just a fairly simple case based on pics shown. So, a CAD design and send it out to contract manf for bid and then production. Heck, even NewVape may have been a potential source as they are indeed a machine shop.
If you couldn't design a case and deliver it in six years, you never should have taken money for it. And you should not still have it for sale on your site to this day, IMO.
Sorry, but the case situation....that's hard to accept.
And, store credit after six years of non-delivery? And some folks above are saying that they were told no on a refund. That's just money for nothing at this point.
I still wish Hopper the best of luck, I still plan on buying a new GH when you are back in production, but I can't find any justification for Hopper's failure to deliver on am empty case for such a long period of time.
I am glad you have brought up this perspective as it illustrates a disconnect between the development of products and the perception of users.
1. The case is stainless steel on the outside yes, the inside must have a plastic overmold so your device is not scratched by the case itself. It is not just drilling some holes in a piece of bar stock. The deep cavities required for the vape to fit into are a challenge. An overmold of that size might cost 30-50k to setup. We need to design the mold, have it made, tested, tweaked, and so on. All this is made harder by the fact that the tolerances on the case need to be very tight, so the mold seals well. During the production of the case exterior, we need to monitor that this is indeed being done correctly, or the mold will be ruined. All of this takes way more time and effort than you imagen.
2. CAD design for a consumer product that accounts for all of the above, not even including the mold design, might take weeks for a first revision. None of it is trivial; each decision affects the next and needs to be thought out to the end. This is not a model that is going into a 3d printer, but something that will cost over 30k, excluding labor, to even see the first production unit and then will have many many produced.
3. The end caps need solid retention that will last for many years of removal without becoming loose. This is a difficult challenge just by itself and has undergone many design revisions to get to the point where we thought it was good. Lessons were learned from the Grasshopper, and we don't plan or repeating some of our obvious mistakes.
4. All of this is further compounded by per unit cost requirements. Machining metal to tight tolerances is expensive, even overseas. Some of the original designs cost more to produce that we charged.
5. It is a misrepresentation to say we couldn't design and build it in 6 years. As I stated in my original message, most of the delays came from fixing Grasshopper problems, which were deemed a priority. As much as we would have liked to spend our time working on new products, this could not be with our small staff.
6. Anyone who is saying they could not get a refund has not contacted
support@grasshoppervape.com, or there was some mixup. It has been a well-known policy that if you have a pre-order, you can get a refund.
I don't like to harp on the difficulties but only wish to point out that there is a little more to it. There is a high bar, which is great for consumers.
or your hopper is running cold... otherwise I want tosee a video... you taking 15 sec. draw on hopper temp 5 native wihtout glass...
