I don't really want to wade into this trainwreck. But I notice that many of
the performance improvement or repair items we put on our Tigers have the
designer or seller's name attached to it. We have Dan Walters' traction arm.
Doug Jennings' fulcrum pins. Dale's Midget rack conversion. Three things about
that: It identifies the source of the part. It acknowledges the contribution
of the designer. And in some weird way, it establishes a pedigree for the
part.
The last thing bothers me a little. Because it implies that when you get your
stuff from someone else (or if you design your own) it's somehow not as good.
Or conversely, if you have two identical things and one is made by a little
known guy and the other is made by or sold through a well-known place, then
automatically the part from the well-known place is deemed to be better.
Front suspension design is a reasonably well-known art. Within a broad range
the requirement for caster, camber, and toe change as a function of suspension
travel can be made adjustable and you could have two fabricated suspensions
and crossmember designs that did nearly the same thing while having no common
roots (other than being designed to fit the same car). Sometimes the relative
timing of things is coincidental and the near-simultaneous emergence of two or
more similar products is more a result of coincidence and external forces than
of direct competition between two designers.
However, in this case the chronology of things puts Hokanson's suspension
first. That may have served as inspiration for Dale's product, or maybe more
than that, but outside of direct knowledge of how each design was arrived at
(do they have the same A-arm design and mountings? Is the crossmember built in
the same way? Is the spindle design the same? Who has the original CAD
simulation work to back up their claims?) it's hard (for me) to say whether
Dale's crossmember should be regarded as a copy or as a parallel design.
All I can say is it's dumb that we should even need to have this thread on the
mailing list. United we stand, and all that. Give credit where it's due.
Cheers,
Theo
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