Interesting post from Wilier on fakes

unconstituted

unconstituted wrote:

notfastenough wrote:

Crikey has a point. I get that many products and services need to be outsourced and/or offshored to keep the brand company competitive, but if you outsource your proprietary designs to a country famous for a. it’s widespread counterfeiting, and b. evidence that even the state colludes in this practise, with efforts to hack into overseas computer systems being traced to Chinese government sources, can a company really be surprised to then find counterfeit products being made available?

As opposed a country like ours that colludes in mass surveillance of its own citizens including capturing private webcam imagery? Or maybe that’s okay, and it’s our bombing and torturing of overseas nationals in cooked up neo-con war plots that you have issue with? Perhaps you don’t mind that but are opposed to the way we’re run by corporate interests, landed gentry and a bunch of self-serving career politicians ensuring wealth inequality widens?

Take your red scare sanctimony elsewhere please.

They represent a massive economy that manufactures on a global scale, they are acquisitive and they are known to engage in industrial espionage just like we have in the past.

They are no different to countries such as the UK and the US when it comes to wanting to make money, the only twist to that is that a communist state does not recognize patents or copyright, this can cause an interesting dilemma when they then engage in the global market

You taking offence because of your childish black and white view of the world and lack of knowledge of social history is not moving the conversation forward. If you really want to get into political mudslinging I could point out that China provides about 90% of the AK47 rifles used by child soldiers in Africa.

notfastenough

notfastenough wrote:

unconstituted wrote:

notfastenough wrote:

Crikey has a point. I get that many products and services need to be outsourced and/or offshored to keep the brand company competitive, but if you outsource your proprietary designs to a country famous for a. it’s widespread counterfeiting, and b. evidence that even the state colludes in this practise, with efforts to hack into overseas computer systems being traced to Chinese government sources, can a company really be surprised to then find counterfeit products being made available?

As opposed a country like ours that colludes in mass surveillance of its own citizens including capturing private webcam imagery? Or maybe that’s okay, and it’s our bombing and torturing of overseas nationals in cooked up neo-con war plots that you have issue with? Perhaps you don’t mind that but are opposed to the way we’re run by corporate interests, landed gentry and a bunch of self-serving career politicians ensuring wealth inequality widens?

Take your red scare sanctimony elsewhere please.

Quality rant, that! I have Chinese heritage, and if it wasn’t for Special Branch rounding up and deporting Chinese sailors (who had helped in the Allied war effort) after WWII to avoid the wrath of returning British soldiers, I would probably have stronger links to my roots (and likely a Chinese name too). That doesn’t make me blind to the realities of the market. Try searching on eBay for Zipps or Cosmic Carbones and see what you find. Tip: £300 from Shenzen says they probably aren’t real. So talking to me about the traits of Chinese culture or British government misbehavior is barking up the wrong tree sir.

As for calling me sanctimonious, er… Pot, kettle, black.

Think you (and maybe some other noggins too) missed the point.

Bringing political issues like hacking allegations into a situation like fake bike frames is convoluted and misguided. Ofc that would look like the pot calling the kettle black. That was the point of my post, I was holding a mirror to you.

That’s
That’s informative.

Personally I don’t agree with buying fake Wilier or fake Dogme’s or whatever. At the same time you don’t here very few stories of issues with direct import Chinese frames and they mainly seem to be issues with quality control before the bike gets ridden. You’d think the forums would be full of them given the thousands that are sold.

As you said, long term fatigue may be an issue that will rear itself.

vadido wrote:Well all the

vadido wrote:

Well all the tests where figures were given the Nm values were within 20%ish. I suspect a Wilier frame has a far margin of safety so the Chinese frame doesn’t sound too bad.

The quoted tests are for stiffness (with one exception) – which is not really related to safety. It’s probably the easiest thing to match – so long as you put roughly the right amount of material in roughly the same place and with the fibres going in roughly the same direction – presto – the stiffness will be close.

But that says nothing about the absolute strength which will depend on details like exactly what fibres you used and what glues and at what curing temperatures and times … and so on. Plus the details of the design like exactly what radius the stress concentrations have and how you machined in any additional mounting bosses etc.

I’m also pretty dubious about the drop test – it is only measuring the fracture toughness of a brand new frame under sudden massive load. By that time you’re probably going to hit the deck anyway so whether the bike breaks or not might not correlate strongly with your own injuries. Plus it was only on a single sample. I suspect there’s a lot of scatter in the results of a test like that so a one-on-one comparison is not significant.

What really matters is the fatigue strength. i.e. the safe life under regular repetitive (but normal) usage. Unfortunately no-one really knows how to predict that for composite structures (even Airbus it seems !). So who knows which frame is safer ?

Well all the tests where
Well all the tests where figures were given the Nm values were within 20%ish. I suspect a Wilier frame has a far margin of safety so the Chinese frame doesn’t sound too bad.

Who did Wilier buy from? If they’d said it was a Dengfu sourced frame (I don’t know if they make Wilier fakes) then that would give some more meat.

As for the other tests – dropped fork etc, it doesn’t sound very scientific and do we know how the Wilier fork fared.

mattsccm wrote:Finally will

mattsccm wrote:

Finally will the pompous political whinger above clear off, this is a cycling website

And, like crikey, I was also perplexed about the cheap willies.

I see why people buy the
I see why people buy the things. Firstly they are cheap and I for one do not subscribe to the idea that expensive is best. That’s just shows off your wealth which is fine but who is so stupid as to throw away money?
Of course greater price can reflect greater quality and we all have our favourites in that respect. The wife won’t buy cheap meat and I won’t buy cheap willies. Price is not always proportional to quality. To me Rapha isn’t 10 times as good a quality as Aldi. It doesn’t last 10 times as long . Fit can’t be included as that’s personal.
The other point is that many of us try not to pay for what we don’t get. How do we really know if the genuine Willier or what ever isn’t the same as a copy? The manufacture’s claims have to be biased at best. I don’t see any issue in some one making a profit. In fact its downright immoral not to but at the same time not from me! :))
Finally will the pompous political whinger above clear off, this is a cycling website