Engine Factory or Trading Company?

Many of the RC Modelers are discovering that when they need to get their engines fixed, they contact their supplier, only to find out that that they will not be able to get service because the supplier is a Trading Company (overseas mostly) and doesn't or won't service the product.

This is really apparent when the fellas buy the engines from E-Bay and similar sites. So now what........ well your options are few unfortunately. You can contact the seller... good luck... because by now they have changed names, and emails. They have your money and you have the engine, so their responsibility it done.

You can contact the factory directly.. if you know where it is. Again, good luck, because some of them will not sell you parts. They may not even have the parts you need.

It really is a buyer beware world when you buy an engine from an overseas supplier. Some fella's get good engines and they are happy with them... Congratulations.. Others spend big bucks and end up with engines that last several hours and then fall apart.

What really riles a lot of the honest distributors of RC gas engines (I am not just talking the RCGF guys, but many of the others too) is that some of the faux pas sellers masquerade as factory dealers, sell cloned, counterfeit, crashed engines to unsuspecting and trusting modelers. The modelers get these engine, find out they do have junk, and they go to the legitimate sources looking for restitution.

Of course there is none, because all of the legitimate sellers use data bases and will only support their customers. Bad feelings result, and a legitimate supplier has lost a potential long term customer through no fault of their own.

RCGF distributors have dealt with numerous cases of this over the last 8 months. RCGF Engines have been cloned and copied and sold through various channels. The sellers actually tell the customer to go to us for service. We have received engines that are in the RCGF shipping box, and even have the same instruction manual. The engine though is not even close. It doesn't look like ours, or even have any similar components. The seller uses legitimate RCGF Engine pictures and delivers someone elses engine.

Now we have to tell the fella who spent good money on an engine that we cannot support it. It makes for a crappy afternoon.

Buy from legitimate sources. Sure it may cost a few bucks more. But consider that really cheap insurance.