Quote:
Originally Posted by janitor
To put it very simply, Rota uses other manufacturer's designs but not the manufacturing processes.
Example: The popular Rays Volk CE28 - a forged, lightweight racing wheel. Rays has a significant investment on the design, development and materials used on the machinery used to manufacture this wheel, which itself is a product of countless hours of design, development and testing. To put it simply, the unique materials used (which is similar to 6061 aluminum, however optimized for the specific use as an automotive wheel) is specifically formulated to take advantage of the unique manufacturing process (which involves 10,000 tons of force, while spinning the material) by design.
For the sake of consistency let's keep the ideas of "right and wrong, and intellectual property" out of this discussion and concentrate on performance.
Rota offers a popular wheel that looks very similar to, if not virtually identical to the Volk CE28, however this wheel is manufactured by a gravity casting method (essentially pouring melted aluminum into a mold and waiting for it to cool to room temperature) using an unknown and poorly regulated grade of aluminum. Expecting a wheel specifically designed to be made of a specific grade of aluminum using a specific manufacturing method to function when made of inferior materials using inferior manufacturing methods is simply illogical. I strongly believe this is not simply a matter of branding, you are not simply paying for a name.
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Rota uses the same aluminum everyone else uses because it's the cheapest, most readily available, and meets their specs. It's not like Rota started making wheels in the last 10 years to copy other aftermarket wheels, they started making wheels in 1979.
Here is a recent article on their manufacturing process.
http://www.autoindustriya.com/featur...-are-made.html
I don't condone their blatant rip-off of other designs (and they even admit to it in that article) but their manufacturing process isn't much different than most other wheel manufacturers. They have to pass JWL impact tests like anyone else.
Now Chinese knockoff brakes/rotors are a much scarier proposition, they aren't meeting ANY real specification... I'd be more scared of the rotors than the calipers really. They are probably very prone to cracking after a few heat cycles.