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Reply to "EMPI DISC BRAKES"

It's a good question to ask, and nobody (here at least) will think you were bashing Greg or his company.

However... I don't think your issues are isolated at all. Anybody who's been in this hobby for more than a couple of months has experienced something similar, or at least tangentially related.

The state of VW aftermarket parts has been sketchy for the entirety of the 21 years I've been in this hobby. For at least that long (and way, way longer now that I think about the JC Whitney catalogs of my youth), the aftermarket was building parts all over the world to a price point dictated by the apocryphal "cheap VW people" who bought the bulk of them. Even "performance" aftermarket quality was driven down by the same mentality, that parts needed to be less expensive than similar American V8/muscle car speed parts - because if they weren't, people would just buy a Camaro or Mustang instead of hopping up their Beetle.

The reality of who buys these cars and what they are willing to spend has changed pretty markedly over the years, but the low quality of a lot of parts was already baked in the cake. EMPI was purchased several years ago, and is at least trying to clean up their reputation, but they've sold many, many parts over the years that were just garbage and turning that ship around won't happen overnight. Everybody bashes them as a company ("Every Mistake Passes Inspection", etc.), but without EMPI the VW hobby dies (and by extension, large parts of the replica Speedster hobby) almost instantly dies.

The people buying stuff for these cars (and for old VWs) have some money now, and are in the hobby because they are looking for something different, not because they are a tightwad looking for a $70 exhaust. A decent 2L+ engine costs north of $10K now, and people are still buying them. Boutique parts manufacturers are popping up here and there (Avery's Air-cooled, Todd Francis, etc.), which tells me that the hobby isn't dying - but it is undergoing some painful changes. It's hard to know where to go when the price delta between EMPI stuff and stuff by boutique parts manufacturers is so high, and sometimes even the small boutique manufacturers have issues. I have a really expensive AirKewld front disc brake-set on my VW panel bus that has leaked from the master-cylinder reservoir from the day I bought it, and Pete is one of the better guys trying to bring up the level of the game in this hobby.

I think everybody is trying to catch up to the "new normal" where a new build is almost always north of $50K, and parts that were "good enough" on a $20K Kirk Duncan build are not adequate any more.

Sometimes there's just nowhere to turn for an adequate part.

As long ago as 2005, when Henry Reisner of IM was building my coach - he and I talked about the difficulty of trying to build a quality automobile with parts built to a bottom-feeder price point, and how sometimes there just wasn't another alternative other than either buying an EMPI part and completely reworking it (and hoping for the best), and making it himself at enormous cost. At the time, he told me that he'd buy EMPI brake-sets and immediately pull the seals, bearings, and races and just throw them out. They would then install quality domestic bearings, races, and seals. The problem was, that sometimes there just wasn't an alternative for the badly made part.

Most folks don't get this. They think of a $50K car as being "new" and able to perform to the standard that a $50K mass-production car should perform at. Given the sketchy state of parts, it's just not possible for that to happen every single time. This is the "sorting" you hear so much about.

That's definitely not bashing Greg, or anybody else forced to use what cannot be fabricated or purchased elsewhere - it's just a statement of fact and forewarned is forearmed.

Last edited by Stan Galat
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