Knock Off Tuner Car Parts

[JoeThaMan]

Knock Off Tuner Car Parts
It's a known fact that car parts are expensive. We've been reading all your over-the-top love letters and we feel your poverty-stricken pain. We know all about the long, endless hours you spend slaving away on overtime, packing away the dollars you so desperately need. But, what if we were to tell you that you could find a set of brand new TEIN springs for sixty bucks, a GReddy blow-off valve for only twenty-five bones and a TRD oil cap for fifty cents? Would that grab your attention? We know it got ours.
If you spend any amount of time on the amazing techno-innovation known as the Internet, you'll find yourself swimming through a sea of car parts. A simple search with the words "TEIN" and "springs" returns more than 235,000 website hits. Now, unless TEIN has ramped up manufacturing to near-Nike levels without letting us know, some of those vendors aren't really selling the right springs. That is, if they're actually selling products in the first place, and we don't mean out the back of an unmarked van.
The nature of marketing and branding is not lost on the automotive world. Distinctive shapes, colors, logos and designs make the products of certain manufacturers easy to spot, and easy to remember. The hard part comes once your product hits the market. A set of uniquely colored baby-blue springs can help you set the world on fire, but you can't stop someone else from making their own baller blue springs. Piracy though, is the point at which an exact copy is made, or when a product is passed off as another company's invention.
Thousands of parts are sold each year bearing strangely hilarious and slightly unoriginal names such as CWest-style, Greddy-style, and K&N-style. The resemblance to the real product is often uncanny at 50 feet, but obviously inferior at two. For some buyers, it doesn't matter that these products don't have any real research and development behind them, and that their only design mantra is the almighty bottom dollar. Besides, when you don't have any money and you want to go fast, a $5 air filter starts to look pretty damn good.
But all is not what it seems on the surface, and one must be careful. Would you risk damaging a $7,000 car by using a $5 part? $7,000 isn't exactly pocket change, and no car is ever so cheap, that it can be considered disposable. So be wary out there, it's a jungle of crappy products, and you don't want to be tangled in that mess.
Real R&D
The most obvious, main purpose of any car part is plain and simple function. You buy a shifter bushing because it says it'll tighten up shifts, and when it arrives, that thing better shift like butter. That's why all the best parts on the market are rigorously designed and tested, undergoing multiple revisions before hitting the market. Computer-aided design is just one of the tricks used by such manufacturers as Stillen, Cosworth and Brembo. Skunk2 Racing takes it one step further, using a multi-axis robotic arm to take precise measurements of every car that undergoes development.
TEIN USA's R&D department disassembles and tests each new suspension before it hits the market, often tailoring spring rates and damping curves specifically for the US market. Even air filters such as the venerable K&N six-layer cotton gauze unit and AEM's more recent DRYFLOW filter design didn't just spontaneously pop out of a Chinese manufacturing plant. They were designed, redesigned and then redesigned again to make sure they were the best that they could be.
There's a reason that the products of certain companies are duplicated for sale, they work. Development of a part is not cheap, but it ensures that the product will do the best job that it's designed to do. Knock-off parts are often just cheap imitations slapped together by slave children with shackles around their ankles, and that's not real R&D at all.
Performance
Most of the time, a $20 imitation part will pale in comparison to its $100 real counterpart, offering little to no gain for the sacrificed Jefferson. From exhaust systems to intercoolers, the counterfeit world seemingly has performance on lockdown. But, more often than not, these parts are a waste of money and a headache in the waiting. Intake pipes often don't fit correctly and unproven intercooler designs feature huge pressure drops and poor thermal capacity. Like a bad photocopy, design details get lost along the way during the copying process, ruining your power-to-dollar-return ratio.
Exhaust systems from GReddy, HKS, Injen and A'PEXi are dyno-tested before release, ensuring that a satisfactory power gain will be had. Fake parts have no testing carried out on them, and the money pirate who manufactures them could care less about how much power you're expecting to make. The buzzing leaf blower tone and vibrating interior trim might lead you to believe that you're pulling 10-second slips out of your ass, but don't be surprised when you're left with just 200dB and 85 wheel hp.
Proper Fitment
The Spooned Sports box arrives in the mail and you tear it open with an excited frenzy. The cat-back looks shiny enough and a seven-inch slash cut tip means lots of power, right? Once your friend shows up and jumps out of his Alty, you're ready to go. The car's up on stands, the stock exhaust is in a dumpster and then you hit a wall. There are no exhaust hangers on the muffler, the piping is too short and the canister is too large to fit. Uh oh, it's knock-off headache time.
Making a part that fits seems easy enough, but it's one of the top problems with fake parts. From direct-fit Stoptech brake lines to Edelbrock headers and Magnaflow exhausts, real manufacturers take the time to ensure that parts fit well and are easy to install. We've seen B-series headers that hang too low, "OE-fit" WRX intercoolers that don't line up on the stock mounting brackets and intake pipes that aren't mounted to anything at all.
Body parts are perhaps the worst of the bunch. Because body kits and hoods don't really have any moving parts or mechanical function, the only thing that matters is if they look good and fit well. Well, zero out of two ain't bad.
Body parts from companies such as Ings+1, Spoon Sports, C-West and Chargespeed are designed and tested for fitment and aerodynamic function. Knock-off parts are usually made on the cheap, with hundreds of bumpers coming out of one mold. This spells trouble for proper fitment and installation. Expect your body shop to charge you extra for the labor involved, such as molding and filling the gaps in your body panels. That is, if the cheap fiberglass construction doesn't shatter apart on you first.
If you're familiar with fabrication and, how do we put this, unique installation ideas, then pickup the cheapest parts you can find. But to us, drilling and tapping multiple holes to install a bumper doesn't sound like much fun at all.
Safety
It may sound ridiculous to you at first, but picking the wrong parts could damage your car severely, or worse, kill you. Downpipes and sewer tubing exhausts for turbocharged cars, often sold as "no tuning required," can raise boost levels to dangerous highs. Too good to be true, $450 new T3/T4 turbocharger kits will often fall apart or overboost, scattering a running engine with miscellaneous metal bits. A fake GReddy Type-RS blow-off valve we picked up turned out to have one of the worst diaphragm seals we've ever seen, with rubber so thin, we're sure it'd rip apart after pulling through just two gears. The dangers of fake parts are so real in fact, during one run through the desolate desert of California, Technical Editor Ryan McKay's fake K&N-style air filter collapsed under boost, allowing tiny rock shards to destroy the compressor wheel of his turbocharger.
Worse still is the potential for personal injury. Shoddy bumpers and front-mount intercoolers will often require the removal of the front bumper beam, leading to the very real possibility of your engine finding its way on to your lap during an accident. Fake Sparco steering wheels and safety harnesses only provide the illusion of safety. There are zero instructions included relating the proper mounting position and angles for a harness, and even if there were, the material and webbing in the fake harnesses would not stand up to the strict crash standards of the real Sparco unit.
Warranty Service
Quality manufacturing will mean a quality product, and if a company stands behind its offerings, they will provide the warranty to prove it. It's their guarantee to you that the part will function as promised, and will continue to do so far after the purchase date. Counterfeit parts are not designed to last very long, and if they break, you're shit out of luck.
One of the worst cases we found, exact copies of TEIN S-Tech lowering springs recently began to circulate on the market. The packaging, instructions, springs, spring isolators and warranty papers were all duplicated exactly. TEIN's contact info was even listed in the fake manual as the place to call if you had any problems. You could have installed these, had problems with an uneven ride height and then ended up calling TEIN with your problems. The only catch there is, TEIN won't help you out. Why should they, you were the one that didn't want to pony up for the real thing. The best way to keep your parts safe is to purchase genuine products from authorized dealers, and then register your warranty card immediately.
Looks
If you've gotten this far and you still don't care about the potential safety and fitment issues of using fake parts, keep this in mind--they look cheaper than that bronze Folex on your wrist. Rough castings, unfinished edges, unbranded logos, cheap chrome-dipped exteriors, the list goes on and on. Fake parts are designed to be cost-effective and cheap, and their looks will reflect that. You may rather have a seizure before you'll pay for an ARC titanium spark plug cover, but that ARC piece will look a hell of a lot better than the rough cut sheet metal piece you picked up at the corner speed shop.
Your ride is your baby, a source of pride for what you've done to it, don't mess it up with some of the cheapest accessories on Earth. That is, unless you like rain gutter rear wings and plywood body kits. If that's the case, by all means, knock yourself out. Literally. With a big, rusty hammer.

Photo Gallery: Knock Off Tuner Car Parts - Import Tuner Magazine



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