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To: dayglored

Hey, that is a great story!

Honda still makes some of the best small 4 stroke engines for things like pressure washers and generators. They started manufacturing them in China and the Chinese factories that made them started selling the exact same motors with slightly less QC to other retailers who sold them to the public for much less.

The motors were even painted the same color (red) and nearly all of the parts were interchangeable. Honda rightfully sued and now you can still buy the clone engines but these days you have to get them in blue and not red. So at least you can tell them apart from the genuine articles.


11 posted on 05/18/2015 9:37:37 PM PDT by fireman15 (Check your facts before making ignorant statements.)
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To: fireman15; Swordmaker
> Honda still makes some of the best small 4 stroke engines for things like pressure washers and generators...

That's a great story too!

And it happens I have a gas generator with a small Honda 4-stroke engine (red), that is now about 15 years old. Great little engine.

It also happens that in the mid-2000's I was (as a hardware design engineer) designing PC/Mac data storage peripherals, and upper management relocated our production to mainland China "to cut costs"... grrr-rrr... and within about 3 years, we started seeing our products, without our nameplate but otherwise I-Freakin'-Dentical, appearing on the Asian and European markets, competing with ours but at a lower price.

Unfortunately we were a small company without the resources to fight, and they had the tooling for our product enclosures, etc. so they had us over a barrel. Man, that sucked. And I'm not sure, to this day, that our upper management ever really understood how badly their decision "to cut costs" that way hurt the company. When the place folded three years later, they blamed it on anything but their poor decisions. *sigh*

13 posted on 05/18/2015 10:34:15 PM PDT by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is...sounding pretty good about now.)
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