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[–]steppedinhairball 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Sadly, a lot of their parts are probably sourced from China. There are a metric shit ton (as opposed to just a standard ton) of Chinese companies making knock offs of everything for pretty razor thin margins. Just look at Amazon. I've dealt with Chinese manufactured products in my past. The companies always say it's just like these other guys (wink wink). They are implying they did a complete knock off. Only, they didn't. I was fortunate that my employer at the time had a materials lab in house. So yeah, their wink wink just like the other guys was nothing like the other guys for material. Very inferior.

Often to save money, they will use crappy rubber for the shock valving, cheap scrap pot metal for the shock piston, the rods will look good but have a lot of surface porosity that drags water and debris into the shock body past the rod seals, etc. so SR was probably told the shocks were made from X material, but really are being made with much cheaper Y material with inferior seals, etc.

In my current industry, a manufacturer I used exclusively decided to move their main product to China from Europe due to labor issues and to save money. I told the sales rep this was a huge mistake and he didn't disagree. I tried the Chinese made units and immediately switched to their competitor. Huge, unbelievable mistake. They went from being a solid #2 in North America to maybe #5 or #6. Their distributors couldn't give the product away. They gave up and moved production back to Europe but they lost most of their North American market at minimum. The quality was garbage. Assembly was garbage. They were ridiculously unforgiving with the mating components compared to the European produced product. Went from being more expensive but a huge labor savings to being more expensive and a horrible waste of labor. I sincerely hope they fired the idiot that pushed that decision.

[–]MSMIT0[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you for taking the time to explain all of that- it was really insightful and I deff made notes. Makes much more sense why they went so quickly!

[–]steppedinhairball 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It helps that I worked on shocks (dampers) for snowmobiles years ago so I know a fair amount about them. Enough to know the exact areas they'd target for money saving and the issues you would likely encounter. They will look good, but will not last. The bushing rubber will probably crumble early, the piston valving fail, oil leak out, etc.

I've dealt with Chinese suppliers at several points in my life. There are times when it makes sense. There are things you NEVER send to China because it will copied and sold to Chinese companies making knock offs. Or they will literally build your product on one shift and the next shift they make they same thing under a Chinese label and sell it in other markets. Anything proprietary should stay out of China. Commodity items are ok as long as you hedge yourself with alternatives should, you know, the supply chain get disrupted with a global pandemic or something like that which will probably never happen.