Chinese Clones!

[bmxr123]

Below is a picture of a Qlink 250..Its a GZ250!!!!If they didn't purchase the blueprints for that motor from Suzuki, then they certainly stole them!! Jk..Same single-cylinder, four-valve, dual-header design..I saw one of these in person and freaked out..The dead giveaway in my opinion was the(identical to the GZ line) "cosmetic" valve cover caps on each side of the top end. To be specific, it is the plastic chrome you have to pull with an allen key to change your spark plug. On the other hand, the big difference was the mag wheels. But this "asian" suzuki seems to bridge that gap! Cool...but, scary: Japanese engineering making way to a much more profit-oriented, cost-cutting, business savvy China. I dig the "honda-vtx-style" headlight too.



I also have noticed that Honda sold their bulletproof 35-years-strong single-cylinder XR,XL, NX 100, 125, 150, 200 blueprints as i see them on EVERYTHING CHINESE OFF-ROAD. And if we Americans weren't so OBSESSED with big twins and SUV's then we would probably see more on the road.

I once built a Honda 1970 cb100 cafe racer in which the motor was experiencing blow-by. While the rebuild was taking place, i bought a Panterra(chinese)125 dirt bike off of craigslist for 150 and swapped the motor right onto the 1970 Cb100 frame with no modifications and she was breathing life again within the hour! That chinese motor ended up being pretty reliable, and once rebuilt, I mounted the fresh honda nx125(technically a 175 after the .50 over bore) onto the Panterra dirt bike. Both machines still scream to this day....aaand get oil changes frequently

below is the pudding:

[jonathan180iq]

That is totally rad....


I'm just oggling it like a little kid. That's awesome.

[Water Warrior 2]

Many Chinese clones are built under license from the Japanese manufacturers. Also some Japanese designed components are built in China for Japanese bikes. It's all about money and keepng the economy running smoothly with a decent return in profits. It is the World Economy thing and any manufacturer who doesn't play well with others will likely fail in the long run.

[jonathan180iq]

That being said, that photo also looks pretty horribly photoshopped...

[bmxr123]

No photoshop..Just sub-par paint jobs and poor lighting..lol...Everything ELSE about that cafe build was pro though!..I SWEAR!!..lol...can you guess where the battery is?



Those pics were taken with a samsung epic 4g touch(that probably had a dirty lens)lol..Maybe that was a contributor as well..

[jonathan180iq]

No man... haha I know your bike is for real. I'm talking about the Chinese Clone photo... it's terrible.

[bmxr123]

oh yeah!..the front wheel is oblong!


LOL

And the flames and text box with characters: "legend" smacked on there by the company's secretary or something. ooh, cost-cutting at its finest!

[burkbuilds]

Even without the original designers selling their blueprint designs, it's fairly common to "reverse engineer" other people's products and it's done all the time and not just by foreign companies. I've worked in the aftermarket automotive industry reverse engineering parts from OEM products and as long as there isn't anything proprietary about it, that is to say, unique and copyrighted, everyone does it. The key here is that you can't just copy their plans, you have to buy the part and make your own plans based on that part, so everyone ends up with a slightly different, yet functionally compatible part. That's why you sometimes take in an old part to the auto parts store and the one they hand you to replace it might not look exactly the same, but the guy behind the counter is swearing that it's the right part and you are looking at it saying, "it can't be the right part, it doesn't look the same as this one". If the Engineer did his work well, it should work even though it might not look the same, but sometimes, as you probably have experienced, it does not fit or it interferes with something else on your vehicle. Part of that is because the same part may fit ten different models from a time period of 30 years, so it might work on 9 out of 10 of those without a hitch, but on your car, something else was different and it doesn't work.

It was interesting to do that type of work because I got to test and compare four or five different manufacturer's products with each other and the OEM product while making my own drawings. Some things could have a very wide tolerance and still work and other things often had to be fairly tight, although surprisingly not as tight of a tolerance as they implied in my Engineering classes in college in many instances. In general I found that the Germans and Japanese usually held to the tightest tolerances and the US followed next. Things made in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Argentina were pretty sloppy in tolerance by comparison, usually twice the US Tolerance and 2-3 times the German and Japanese tolerances I typically found.

When I changed jobs and started working with bearing surfaces on electric motors I was overwhelmed by how tight the tolerances in those applications had to be. Almost all the bearing surfaces I work with have to be +- 0.0003" or less. Nothing in the auto parts I worked on ever got close to that, although I never did any internal engine parts and some of those might be that tight. With electric motors our shafts can only have a max run out of 0.002" or less at 1/2" from the furthest end of the shaft after assembly. When I was working on things like brake drums for cars the Chinese were only willing to guarantee run out of 0.025" or less. Some German drums were a max TIR of 0.005" and that was about as good as it got.

[Water Warrior 2]

Very interesting. Thank you BB.

[Fawlty]

Here is a very similar bike. The make is Qingqi (never heard of it). On the face of it looks like a good deal at 1000 Euros.

http://motos.coches.net/ocasion/qingqi/ ... 435329.htm