Hmm... so if I want a Tremec out of a wrecked car I better get one before the supply dries up. I was thinking that I'd really like to do a Tremec swap in my '55 Stude, because a T-5 isn't rated to handle the torque. (I've got a T-10 in it now but with a 3.73:1 rear, it's not really a good highway cruiser.)
nate
I don't think there is any danger of that. They are pretty rugged so a random pull is probably fine. And there is no shortage of kids wrecking mustangs, even older ones.
Have you considered seeing a doctor about your problem?
--scott
The 6 speed tremec's are still in production. Just not in the Mustang GT and V6. In the GT500, camaros etc...
T5's haven't been used in production for at least 16 years. T-45's took over about then.
with material, it's out of spec /different/ ways each time. that's why it's such a headache.
quite a lot of people don't complain. others just get rid of the car quickly so it gets punted on. the problem vids out there appear to me as too serious to dismiss.
don't bet on it. unless they do proper random production sample inspections, which cost money and time, they'd never know. western company culture these days on finished product like that is that you don't do that - you "trust" your supplier.
that won't make the slightest difference.
ime, it's one of the last places people bother to look. by definition, if you take the transmission off, you pull the shaft from the clutch, so once they're separated, people don't and /can't/ look there. there's not much visual indication to go on unless it's an old high mileage vehicle where corrosion and abrasion product is more visible.
I've seen material out of spec consistently one way many times. It depends upon the process controls.
The videos are dramatic but that does not mean everyone has the same very obvious problems or even real problems. Mustang attracts a lot of people that haven't driven an MT before. I've read people complaining of things about the MT82 that have happened with _EVERY_ manual transmission car I've ever driven.
The middle man who would be substituting fakes just doesn't exist here. He's not in the supply chain. If there is anyone between the manufacturer of the part and the buying company it's an approved distributor whom if they put in cheaper fakes -WILL- be caught. It's not an if here, it's a when. When the field failures happen the product is returned, when it is torn down the bad part will be found, when the bad part is found the supplier will be contacted. When the supplier is contacted he will say that isn't his product. This is when the distributor who sold fakes loses his business. There's no way around this process.
Depends on what the actual problem is.
You'd be surprised.
Recently, I got a large batch of transistors from a major distributor which was mostly counterfeit. They were pretty good-looking counterfeits but didn't meet spec and we didn't find out for a while.
Turns out the distributor got parts from the manufacturer, shipped them to a customer. The customer returned them, but actually returned different parts than he was shipped. Now there are counterfeit parts inside the presumably legitimate supply chain. They shipped the returned parts to me.
It's going to get worse before it gets better too.
--scott
It was caught, and that's my point. It can work for a little while but it will be caught sooner or later and then someone is going to have problems. In your case if not the distributor for their inability to verify returns the company that made the swap. A company that -should- be blacklisted from buying the real components from then on.
yup, that's how you do it. happens all the time.
like this:
when i've investigated this kind of thing, it's been down to the warehouse/shipping staff. they load the genuine article, park it around the block where the switch can be made, along with the requisite brown paper envelope, then the load goes on for "legit" distribution. if they're colluding with a "customer" that makes the switch as you describe, then that works too. either way, there are typically millions of dollars to be made doing this kind of thing. all cash. and unless you catch them red handed, it's hard to prove where the transaction happened and thus hard to root out.
if they're deliberately doing it, but that's not always the case. you can't blacklist a multi-million dollar long time customer because their warehouse/delivery staff are on the make. you have to work with them and do a sting to catch the individuals concerned.
that's if you even want to go there. fact is, some customers won't even notice. or if they do, they don't care enough to want to deal with it. fake bearings to an auto manufacturer like frod for whom longevity is not the #1 concern, has a high chance of success.
questionable supplier != approved distributor.
Except a fake part needs to actually function to get to the end user. For someone to make working fakes of low quality or buy them he has to sell the real ones he sold for more. On slim margin standard parts this will be very tough. Not to mention convince his customer that he will sell him the real thing. It takes serious investment to make a bearing that can pass just simple visual inspection.
It's far more profitable to do as indicated in the article you link. find something that is in high demand (high margin) and can't be easily verified to be working. People may take the risk with questionable suppliers and then send them the fakes.
you'd think. but if you've been to business school and have been taught that it costs more to analyze failures than to simply replace them, and that a certain percentage of returns is "acceptable", then you're not going to spend any resources on figuring out what the problem really is.
which is the whole point in the first place. if you buy a $5 chinese bearing fake and substitute it for a $50 skf, that's a better margin than you'll make in any legitimate business.
not really any more than it takes to make a cheapo bearing in the first place. for which there is a limited market. and as far as these manufacturers are concerned, it's worth it to just get the factory up and running, and to acquire the production experience. with enough experience, maybe they can improve quality to the point where the product becomes sellable in its own right.
I've worked in three different industries. In each product was checked throughout the manufacturing process. When something failed it was punted to a re-work area or just scrapped. The more expensive the product or subsystem the more analysis and rework. They do not go out the door.
Nobody has that sort of margin on standard parts, that's my point. Even best in the world at making standard parts are running on single digit percentage margin. The cheap stuff is usually not all that much cheaper. On a bearing you're looking at cents of difference. Now the guy who made the swap can't sell at full value. Buying from him is a risk so he has to have a much lower price... but the price of what he bought to substitute doesn't allow it...
What's needed to make cheap bearings is so expensive that at the end of the day the cheap bearings can only get market share because of the "savings" over thousands and millions of units. The swapper would have to do so much volume to make it crime worth doing that he might as well do something far easier. There's a reason fakes target high margin stuff. The way to do it that makes any sense for someone to run the return scam. There's too much risk for the little reward other ways.
ok, $10 and $50. that's a real 400% profit.
no, you're talking hundreds of percent. a re-labeled cheapo $10 bearing masquerading as a top of the line skf explorer series is easily that much.
sorry, but that bit's not correct. even in the retail channel, you can have a 100% pricing difference between name brand bearings of ostensively the same size and spec. no-name are at least that much cheaper again. that's a pretty decent margin, and a good deal better than a distributor would normally make.
again, that's not true. you've read scott dorsey's fake transistor story. you'd think the margin minuscule, but the difference between a
3¢ transistor and a 15¢ transistor is a huge percentage. that's why it happens.and don't believe the b.s. about "our margins are single digit". that's up there with "we can't sell below dealer invoice" from a car salesperson.
OEMs don't pay retail. They certainly don't pay retail from some shipping dock guy who stole them. In fact, OEMs don't deal with guys on the street in cash at all.
You're not going to get a manufacturer to buy your truckload of stolen bearings for anything close to retail. Your $50 bearing is more like $12-15 to a manufacturer. So you're going to have to price the stolen bearings below that. On the other hand, you're most likely going to need to buy your substitution bearings at retail because you're not a typical customer.
BTW Do you just do these lines of BS arguments for fun? To waste other people's time typing reponses?
MANUFACTURERS DO NOT PAY RETAIL. Not anywhere close. Retailers and middlemen can mark up the better product, the better brands to the person who buys one or a handful, they can't do that so much with the crap. For OEMs, it doesn't work that way. Trying to sell your stolen bearings or whatever commodity part at a profit over what you put in their place is going to be a tough sell.
You also neglect that it was done by another customer, not some guy in the dock peddling them on the street. You're arguing the later. It makes sense for someone who actually _USES_ the parts. Your guy on the dock has to source the fakes, pay for them, then peddle the stolen ones somewhere at way under the value. The customer that puts fakes in the RMA box sells his product with the good ones. He's actually seeing a savings. Your dock guy is risking prison time for small change (net) at best.
Except for one thing... it's often my job to know how far down they have left to go. And I certainly know the kind of margins on the stuff the company I work for has on the finished product.
i get that. thanks. it's actually rather insulting to suggest that that's not obvious.
but some distributors will. particularly if for a shipment headed overseas.
retail is red herring. again. i quoted you "retail" because the differentials are easy for you to verify, and the differentials remain the same. i was rather hoping this was obvious enough not to have to spell out.
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