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How many manufacturers are there really?


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I would think re-branding. Remember ASP /SC?. Rumour control at the time said they were the same motor with a different logo. I have bought several 4250 - 800 motors recently. After having scanned the web, I am fairly certain they all come from the same place, and are finished slightly differently (and huge price hikes in some cases).

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I used to work for a company that imported lithium batteries. We're talking 10-12 years ago, so is now out of date, but at the time:

I have nothing to back any of this up other than "discussions around the water cooler" with the staff, including reps who went to the factories in China.

At that time, there were only 5 factories in China that made what we know as LiPo's, is in the individual cells in the soft foil bags. They would make them to any size/shape, and assemble them into batteries as per customer requirements. The biggest cell available for many years was 5000mAh, which is what lead to the biggest battery being that specific capacity. Not one single manufacturer made any promises/guarantees about discharge rates above 1C, nor provided any warranty around that. And likewise charge rates were only ever portions of 1C according to the manufacturers.

Of course, at the time there were any number of RC LiPo brands, all claiming theirs was the best, with it's 2C charge rate, 50C discharge etc etc, and assembled from premium hand picked cells etc etc. So in reality, all these brands, could have only been purchasing the same products, from a handful of manufacturers, and all claims on the battery sticker and website/shop were applied by the batt reseller, not the manufacturer. 

(Of course the same claims are still made, but there will be significant increase in manufacturing to cater for the cellphone demand, inprovements in battery technology etc.)

 

 

 

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Matt,

 

Why do you think they are rebranding the same product?

 

I can think of a couple of exceptions (highly regulated industries) but I am sure other manufacturing companies will quality/performance check their production line with top notch stuff to supplier A and just in spec stuff to supplier B. From bearings to electronic manufacturers you can always pick your performance/quality spec and then build it to a price. 

 

At work we used to use an electronic bidding system for infrastructure projects £100k up to £10M in a Dutch auction style and after one such session with a couple of UK air handling manufactures fighting it out to get the work we were talking to one of the suppliers. They (and the other company) knew exactly what their labour , material etc costs were. As bidding came to a conclusion the only two factors both companies were bidding on was spare production line availability (better keep people working than doing nothing) and......where there were gaps in our specification. We ended up very low quality steel work (our fault as it was not in the spec) and the equipment did not last long.

 

On another post there was a discussion about the poor accuracy of battery checkers, can't see the point of risking an expensive model for a cheap checker.

 

Buy cheap, buy twice

 

IMHO its the quality of product and service, but each to their own.

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Not exactly  "badge engineering" but along the same lines. I bought a computer with an Intel I7 processor chip as I thought it was top of the range (at the time 8 - 10 years ago and then read in a computer magazine that the I3, I5 and I7 chips were the same, just that the higher numbers performed more tests before crashing. Seems to have paid off as both laptop and desktop computers have never let me down due to the   electronics only mechanical faults.

John

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1 hour ago, John Tee said:

Not exactly  "badge engineering" but along the same lines. I bought a computer with an Intel I7 processor chip as I thought it was top of the range (at the time 8 - 10 years ago and then read in a computer magazine that the I3, I5 and I7 chips were the same, just that the higher numbers performed more tests before crashing. Seems to have paid off as both laptop and desktop computers have never let me down due to the   electronics only mechanical faults.

John

 

Not sure which magazine you read that in John, but it sounds like tosh to me.

 

There is no absolute definition of what i3, i5, i7 (and i9) mean, but they are a relative measure of performance between processors of the same generation. Generally speaking the higher the number, the better the performance. This years i5 might be better than an i7 from 5 years ago, but within the same generation, they can be reliably used as a guide to relative performance.

 

Explained here (and plenty of other places):

https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/386100/what_difference_between_an_intel_core_i3_i5_i7_/

 

 

Edited by Gary Manuel
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"Why do you think they are rebranding the same product?" 

Simply because, in the case of brushless motors for example, there are so many with virtually identical specs. Brands seem to appear and disappear but the products remain the same. 

As an example, the " Skywalker" ESC sold by HK appears to be very similar to the "XP2" ESC sold by Overlander. Evidently they are manufactured by third parties, as there is no "Eflite Factory" or "Overlander Factory". 

Maybe even the distributor isn't aware that the same product is leaving the same factory and having a different label put on it. 

 

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For ESCs, lipos motors and lower end servos re-branding is rife - as per the lipo example given above by Dale, there are only so many factories producing these items as our hobby is not big enough to support huge numbers of OEM manufacturers. As you move up the price bands you are more likely to be getting an OEM product, but even that isn't guaranteed - for instance the FMS and Eflite motors and servos have a very strong resemblance to much lower priced items available elsewhere, and (in my expereince) don't have any obvious performance or reliability benefits over them either.

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8 hours ago, John Tee said:

Not exactly  "badge engineering" but along the same lines. I bought a computer with an Intel I7 processor chip as I thought it was top of the range (at the time 8 - 10 years ago and then read in a computer magazine that the I3, I5 and I7 chips were the same, just that the higher numbers performed more tests before crashing. Seems to have paid off as both laptop and desktop computers have never let me down due to the   electronics only mechanical faults.

John

 

That's true of the Intel Xeon server chips too. Depending on the Xeon model, it's just an i7, i5 etc binned for low energy consumption / cooler running.

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7 hours ago, Matt Carlton said:

"Why do you think they are rebranding the same product?" 

Simply because, in the case of brushless motors for example, there are so many with virtually identical specs. Brands seem to appear and disappear but the products remain the same. 

As an example, the " Skywalker" ESC sold by HK appears to be very similar to the "XP2" ESC sold by Overlander. Evidently they are manufactured by third parties, as there is no "Eflite Factory" or "Overlander Factory". 

Maybe even the distributor isn't aware that the same product is leaving the same factory and having a different label put on it. 

 

 

A clubmate and I compared the Zeee and Overlander lipos. The Zeee can be bought from Amazon, the Overlander I'm not sure but I understand it's more expensive - the packs were identical bar the label, down to the location and amount of tape holding the cells together inside the shrink-wrap.

 

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