speedmaster stuff pulled from Summit racing shelves

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I agree this guy has every right to be pissed, but why is everyone all of a sudden upset with Speedmaster's business model? They have been copying other companies parts and selling them at cheaper prices for years.
The issue has come to a head because some CNC programmer in China failed to remove the other company's name before they started the production run. How many of the "Speedmaster" employees in China can read English? It most likely looked like squiggly lines to the guys over there. I am sure Speedmaster management is pissed they did not do a better job of quality control. If the company name had not been milled into the part, who would have ever known about this copy?

Yes, this guy should be pissed, but they did not do this to have his company do the customer support like he purports in his video.

If you have purchased Speedmaster parts, take a look at yourself before you get too pissed about their business model.
 
318willrun said:
for whatever it's worth... this is what their websites brag .. i copied and paste
"Edelbrock Performance Cylinder Heads are indeed made in the USA, offering top-notch quality and performance. Crafted from A356 aluminum"

they also used the term "USA state of the art foundry" and it's in San Jacinto, CA. They say it's located there strategically for the climate to help the molding process.
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They can "say" whatever they want to. Only a certain percentage of their products need to ba made here for them to legally make that claim.
 
Yeah, nothing new about their business model. Also, I seriously doubt Summit would have sent parts to him for warranty work....lol
 
RustyRatRod said:
They can "say" whatever they want to. Only a certain percentage of their products need to ba made here for them to legally make that claim.
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Claiming made in USA doesn't really work that way. Typically these days it's a percentage of the final value of an item. If a $2 chinese casting gets turned into a $100 final product, then it's "made in usa from global materials" or some BS. But they can't make 51% of their parts domestically and suddenly claim all their products are made in USA - that's why their stamped parts like breathers are marked made in china.

The thing is, the penalties for claiming 'made in USA' aren't very stiff, and so many companies DO claim domestic when in fact they are not. In Edelbrock's case, it's not hard to see they have their own production facility and are running parts there every day. Edelbrock makes most of their money running their foundry and they make castings for many others too. They would be shooting themselves in the foot to make castings overseas. Besides, buying bulk castings overseas is a tough cash-flow position to maintain for an industry that sees highly seasonal demand. If anything, I would suspect they make some of their tooling overseas, but they have their own tool and die shop too, so I doubt that's the case for much of their own products. If for no other reason, foreign tooling is always a nightmare to un-screw. It's the route chosen by cheap-*** startups or small businesses who's credit line comes from a card. Some of their outside customers are likely those cheap startups or small shops though, so I'm sure they deal with some foreign made tooling one way or another.

Owning expensive capital equipment like an injection molding facility or a foundry means it makes sense to sell an in-house product to use up excess capacity as your outside customer demand naturally ebbs and flows. Every major production shop I've worked for has the go-to jobs that keep the place busy between the big paying jobs. The base-load of in-house product or go-to jobs is what keeps the value-added processes (machining, plating, screen printing, etc) busy enough to justify their existence and then those capabilities are used to serve outside customers and that's where a company's main profit flow comes from. This arrangement also often helps keep retail prices level as things like material and energy cost fluctuate over time (remember when prices would actually come back down some after a big spike? the good ol' days..).
 
I honestly doubt if anyone’s race car is 100% American made because we would have to really do some digging to make that statement. Was the Tig filler wire American made. How about the internal valving of the shocks. Playing this game for close to 50 years the quickest I’ve ever gone was 9.82 at the time. I bought my Daytona and went low 9’s and then high 8’s. I personally would have been stuck at that ET probably for life had 440source Chinese parts entered the scene with their stroker packages. They got me into the mid 8’s. I have a couple Calais cranks and a keith black block, and Indy and B1 heads. But with the availability if Chinese made Molnar cranks and rods I wouldn’t be buying crazy priced American rods and cranks.
 
Phreakish said:
Claiming made in USA doesn't really work that way. Typically these days it's a percentage of the final value of an item. If a $2 chinese casting gets turned into a $100 final product, then it's "made in usa from global materials" or some BS. But they can't make 51% of their parts domestically and suddenly claim all their products are made in USA - that's why their stamped parts like breathers are marked made in china.

The thing is, the penalties for claiming 'made in USA' aren't very stiff, and so many companies DO claim domestic when in fact they are not. In Edelbrock's case, it's not hard to see they have their own production facility and are running parts there every day. Edelbrock makes most of their money running their foundry and they make castings for many others too. They would be shooting themselves in the foot to make castings overseas. Besides, buying bulk castings overseas is a tough cash-flow position to maintain for an industry that sees highly seasonal demand. If anything, I would suspect they make some of their tooling overseas, but they have their own tool and die shop too, so I doubt that's the case for much of their own products. If for no other reason, foreign tooling is always a nightmare to un-screw. It's the route chosen by cheap-*** startups or small businesses who's credit line comes from a card. Some of their outside customers are likely those cheap startups or small shops though, so I'm sure they deal with some foreign made tooling one way or another.

Owning expensive capital equipment like an injection molding facility or a foundry means it makes sense to sell an in-house product to use up excess capacity as your outside customer demand naturally ebbs and flows. Every major production shop I've worked for has the go-to jobs that keep the place busy between the big paying jobs. The base-load of in-house product or go-to jobs is what keeps the value-added processes (machining, plating, screen printing, etc) busy enough to justify their existence and then those capabilities are used to serve outside customers and that's where a company's main profit flow comes from. This arrangement also often helps keep retail prices level as things like material and energy cost fluctuate over time (remember when prices would actually come back down some after a big spike? the good ol' days..).
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It's also not hard to see a big drop in quality with Edelbrock products in the last few years. We've all seen mismatched intake ports and problems with some cylinder heads. SOMETHING is going on and making products overseas would explain it. What do you think it is?
 
I’m intrigued to see how this plays out. The name suddenly appearing on this VB just doesn’t accidentally happen. The drawing would have to be updated before sent to the CNC or someone took an existing VB plate and machined the name in to it. Something seems off about this story but the reality is probably no where near where any of us think it is. :)

From this:
IMG_9616.jpeg

To this?
IMG_9615.jpeg
 
RustyRatRod said:
It's also not hard to see a big drop in quality with Edelbrock products in the last few years. We've all seen mismatched intake ports and problems with some cylinder heads. SOMETHING is going on and making products overseas would explain it. What do you think it is?
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I think, I know it's poor QC. Some of it is just the process. Most of the mopar parts are sand-cast versus permanent mold. Sand casting can produce good parts, but worn or neglected tooling results in more tolerances and of the processes they run, sand is probably the most variable. As a result I would expect to see the amount of shift we've seen in some parts in the last few years. Considering how the part would have to be setup for machining, and the other features considered critical, I could see alignment being off and that shift being 'shared' among features or hedged in a way that results in shifted ports. Combine that with younger employees who probably have never driven a carbureted vehicle and it's easy to imagine the many ways parts would get screwed up before it gets noticed.

The fact that customers reached out to them to show the issue and that the company responded at all and that we've heard more recent reports of those same parts being improved says a lot about the company. The adjustments needed to pull that off in the shop take some time and effort, but if parts were coming from overseas there would be 3-5 years worth of inventory to get through before the changes made it out the door. The issues shouldn't have happened in the first place, but a lazy workforce explains it perfectly.

My unpopular opinion is that made-in-USA is also a guarantee of **** quality these days. Kids expect $20/hr to flip burgers and foundry work is even more uncomfortable than that. This means companies either need to hike prices or scrap fewer parts by cutting corners. Prices can only go so high before the rip off artists take over, and so we get what we have at present. I'm not against imported parts at all, I just won't do business with china. Make me a cylinder head in Mexico or Honduras and I'd never whine a bit - so long as it's their own design.
 
RustyRatRod said:
It's also not hard to see a big drop in quality with Edelbrock products in the last few years. We've all seen mismatched intake ports and problems with some cylinder heads. SOMETHING is going on and making products overseas would explain it. What do you think it is?
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Having dealt with Edelbrock on a couple intake manifolds Edelbrock is trying to turn things around. I’ve seen good things going on. Fingers crossed
 
subcom said:
I’m intrigued to see how this plays out. The name suddenly appearing on this VB just doesn’t accidentally happen. The drawing would have to be updated before sent to the CNC or someone took an existing VB plate and machined the name in to it. Something seems off about this story but the reality is probably no where near where any of us think it is. :)

From this:
View attachment 1716238369
To this?
View attachment 1716238370
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I've experienced it enough first-hand to know exactly what happened. Someone at speedmaster sent a legit part to a shop in China and said "Make it like this", and so they did. Most china based companies couldn't even figure out how to make the part from drawings, almost everything comes from sending samples. If you do send drawings, often you'll receive something that 'looks like' the drawing but won't actually match it. Speedmaster forgot to tell them to take the logo off because they've already done this dozens of times and simply forgot on this go-around. I can almost guarantee that's the case because if it was the first time, someone would have opened the boxes to see that they didn't just get boxes of rocks. Instead, speedmaster probably never put eyes on these parts at all and just slapped a new label over the chinese one to ship the pallet over to Summit. That implies a pretty solid working relationship with the supplier.
I could be wrong, but again I'm basing this on actual experience with counterfeit parts.
 
pittsburghracer said:
Having dealt with Edelbrock on a couple intake manifolds Edelbrock is trying to turn things around. I’ve seen good things going on. Fingers crossed
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The fact that they've gotten into permanent mold castings is another good sign. Permanent molds cost a lot more and the equipment to support them even more so, but the quality is much higher and repeatability is greater which makes thinner walls and precision geometry much easier to produce. Overseas suppliers have been doing permanent molds exclusively for a while now, and that makes it tough to justify paying more for a domestic product that is made using a cheaper/inferior approach. The drawback is that smaller portions of the market, like Mopar parts, probably don't make sense to invest in permanent molds because the return on investment would be measured in lifetimes.

Bad operators can screw up any casting though, and the QC process needs to focus on features that are critical to the end use. I've watched forgings and castings get setup on datums that center meaningless features while ignoring the important bits. Imagine centering an intake on the thermostat housing, and letting the ports/carb base be 1/2" off! I've seen that kind of crap before and it's frustrating.
 
Read this book. I did, and it managed to lower my already-thought-it-couldn't-be-any-lower opinion of the lavishly subsidized sewer that is Chinese industry and its American enablers.

Lowering that particular opinion of mine is a neat trick, because I have direct experience with that festering sewer, from when I worked as a product development manager. One key bit from that experience: "Yes yes easy no problem, we mark all safety approve any certify you want, made in country mark by your specification!"

Attached are examples of targeted spam I receive. That "Daisy" sure does get around.

phake_philips_1.png


femperature_spam.png


Harison_spam.jpg


Mental_Spam.png


Orsam_Spam_Img.jpg
 
Continuing on that theme:
All but the bottom-of-the-bottom-of-the barrel products from the sewer have counterfeit/fraudulent type-approval and certification markings and labels (the shіttiest ones don't even have fake markings). Also common: irrelevant markings that look impressive and reassuring to users (and less-than-stringently-trained and/or time-pressed inspectors).

Take a look at this in the photo: a Chinese power adapter, 10 amps at 15 volts, which is plenty capable of causing mayhem. Let's see what we've got here: an FCC marking, which if it were legitimate would signify that the device does not cause harmful electromagnetic or radio-frequency interference. A CE marking, which if it were legitimate wouldn't mean much of anything at all, because it's a manufacturer's own (unverified) declaration that product complies with EU health-safety-environmental regulations. We've got RoHS, which if it were legitimate would mean the device complies with European Restriction of Hazardous Substances regulations, meaning no lead or cadmium, etc. There's an NYCE marking, which if were legitimate would mean the device complies with the Mexican Normalización y Certificación Electrónica regulations. Oh, and look, there's a warning: "RISK OF ELECTRIC · DO NOT OPEN". And what do we not see? No UL or ETL (USA), no CSA (Canada), no BSA (UK), no JIS (Japan)—none of the actual, real, relevant safety certifications and approvals. But the markings that are on it, why, they sure do look adequate at a less-than-fully-informed glance, eh!

So yeah, those Chinese imitation Carter carburetors? Great price, and it's just a bowl of gasoline on top of your hot engine; I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Likewise: buying ProComp parts or pouring money into the pockets of slimy operators like "Peter Gee" only begets more of this kind of crap.

PretendPowerSupply.jpg
 
There's another possibility to keep in mind here....

It could be that Speedmaster is only buying the offending parts from the same people that the 'original' seller/designer/manufacturer is buying them from....

Those cnc tool paths are awfully similar
 
slantsixdan said:
The entire point of SEMA is to boost the sales of whoever pays to be a SEMA member. That's what these bogus little 'awards' of theirs are designed to do. It's a circle-jerk for marketing purposes, is all.
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Exactly.
 
RustyRatRod said:
It's also not hard to see a big drop in quality with Edelbrock products in the last few years. We've all seen mismatched intake ports and problems with some cylinder heads. SOMETHING is going on and making products overseas would explain it. What do you think it is?
Click to expand...
My best guess is the same problem every company has: So many of the good workers are retiring, etc, and it's difficult to bring in the new crop of workers with any pride, integrity, and accomplished work ethics. I won't even begin to say the changes the company I work for has made to accommodate this new work force. Basically, it's "adapt" or be without a workforce meaning out of business in the future. "Adapt" means more than you'd expect it to be..... Leav'n it at that
 
Let's not forget that as the cost of production goes up (labor, regulatory compliance, etc), the profit margins get thinner and thinner. Costs end up getting cut somewhere. It gets really easy to see why a lot of this **** gets outsourced oversees.
 
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Companies spend millions to develop and market a product, then someone like speedmaster has it copied in china with no developmental cost and sell it cheap. It's easier to make money when someone else has done the work and all you have to do is replicate it.
 
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