Quote:
Originally Posted by badmatt
venture over to the turbo forums. there was a huge discussion of his faulty parts and he got all up about it.... rather funny threads. take a look. his carb hats blowing apart, pulleys he was building and mandrels for customers. And then his customer service.
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I agree 100%... those two threads in question turned very ugly, especially the hat thread, although there may be more going on behind the scenes we don't get to know about. Yes it sucks the hat blew up, but it blew up after several backfires-- not a typical operating condition. Knowing that engines can and sometimes do backfire that should be taken into account when designing the components, however you can not design a part to withstand every abnormal operation condition. Being an engineer I do have concerns about the longevity of Scott's hats; the large near-flat areas will undoubtedly flex from boost to off-boost transitions and eventually there will be a fatigue failure. Overpressure simply accelerates this process, and the large flat areas certainly won't cope well with dramatic overpressure situtations (i.e. a backfire). I voiced my concerns about the shape to Scott in a phone conversation years ago when he emailed me pictures of the then in development hats and it looks like it did come back to bite him.
Personally, I've never had any gripes with Scott except I was told severely underestimated lead times and also when I had difficulty in contacting him during the move of his shop-- he had my money at that time, I didn't have any parts to show for it, and I couldn't get a hold of him. To say I was
very concerned was an understatement-- but I did get the parts in the end and I'm happy with them.
His tensioner setup works mint on my car, I've done a couple out-of-the-box Procharger setups for other people and Scott's setup is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of performance, consistency, and reliability.
I've had a couple of problems too (bad injectors, head unit issues) and both times Wendy went out of her way to help me fix the problem-- although I did have to initiate a few follow-up calls on my own when I didn't hear back from them in a day or two.
I do agree with you on the price/performance ratio of the Banks parts... not very impressed in that department. I still remember when they raised the cost of their cast SBC manifolds nearly 3X because everyone was purchasing the manifolds only instead of the entire kit.