Amazon Fakes That Can Destroy Your Car

Over the years we have learned several things about selling on Amazon. One of the big ones is that any product we publish there that does well will inevitably be copied and relisted under some new no name brand. As frustrating as it is, we take it as a form of flattery and a sign that we are doing something right. One such example is with our coiled dipsticks. This one caught our attention because it is so poorly executed that it could actually destroy an engine. Sadly we cannot name a source of this knockoff since it was returned to us in one of our boxes. Which, by the way, is part of a classic fraud technique that is beyond the scope of this article.

There are many dead giveaways that this is indeed a knockoff, and the first is quite obvious. As you can see this example has a gloss red finish, rather than our standard Wrinkle Red powder coat finish.

The second giveaway is the absence of our logo engraved on the rim.

But it’s the final giveaway which is the potentially dangerous issue. Attachment of the sinker to the spring is very important, and very tricky to get right. Our technique involves several redundancies to ensure that the sinker cannot detach from the spring. With these counterfeit units, I was able to remove the sinker by hand, because all they have done to secure the sinker is use a very light crimp to deform it and pinch the spring. Our fear here is what happens if one of these sinkers gets a lighter crimp or isn’t crimped sufficiently for one reason or another? Is that something you really want to install in your car?

On a genuine CravenSpeed dipstick, we use a technique which creates such a solid connection between the spring and sinker you’d be hard pressed to ever get the end of the spring out without annihilating the spring or the sinker. It is effectively locked in permanently. I’d tell you more about it but I wouldn’t want to give away more answers to our knockoff competitors. I can say we have a very specific assembly process that ensures each sinker is permanently attached to its spring which involves a custom made tool.

At the end of the day the dipsticks are a product that end up in a pretty sensitive area of your engine, which is not a place where you want to be worrying about introducing a nice steel sinker left to float around. Our dipsticks are machined and assembled in the USA, and our design skips no shortcuts to ensure that the sinker stays attached.

If you take anything away from this article, let that be that you just take care when considering cheaper copycat products, as it might not be clear what shortcuts have been taken to make a cheaper product.

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