Is this a Detroit Speed copy?

[DLinson]

It is truly frustrating when you see products on the market are a complete copy of yours. I'm a mechanical engineer for Hunter Engineering and every year at SEMA/APEX we see more copies of our equipment. One company copied every last detail of one of our adapters. They even copied our vendor's logo in their casting. What we did find out on some of the copies is that they don't know the materials, tolerancing, finishes, etc. that are necessary for a product that will function properly for a long time.

It is usually expected to see some of these copies at the APEX show in the Asian section. They usually copy our older outdated equipment. The one that upset me the most is a wheel adapter and accessories that I designed for wheel alignment. Snap-on has and almost identical copy of my adapter design. I can't believe another American vendor would actually do this to another. They changed the design only enough to adapt their equipment to my adapter design. Some people keep telling me that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. That's a bunch of CRAP!!! Grant it we feed off of each other for ideas but we wouldn't copy a product verbatim. We continue to research and develop new products to make sure we stay on top.

At SEMA/APEX they have a group of lawyers on hand to deal with the copyright infringement issues and companies have been tossed out of the show or at least they had to remove the infringing equipment. Launch is a company that is the worst. Besides copying the my adapters they even copied parts of our software. Some of our software engineers were able to get a copy of their program and found files that were directly copied from our programs into theirs without any modification. The file name, size, date, were all the same. That product was definitely removed from their booth and us as well as Snap-on threatened legal action if they try to produce it in the US. Unfortunately, they can sell to whomever they want on the world market which isn't good. We sell our alignment equipment on every continent accept Antarctica. If they are allowed to produce and sell to other countries, that affects us as well.

I wish there was more that Kyle could do to stop the sale of that copied product. I wander if they have patents on their control arm cross bars and the offset inserts for adjustments. I doubt that you could patent a control arm design in general but you could patent novel ideas of control arm.

The other problem is the cost to defend your patents. Our company can afford to pay layers to go after others; smaller companies may not be able to do so.

So if anyone is considering purchasing the control arms on E-bay, shame on you. You are justifying these people to steel other people's designs and their R&D.

I better stop before I get too worked up.

Dennis