I got 3 Duralast starters in one month before I got one that worked. BUT I think the Duralast batteries are pretty good.

 

Yea, if the part is rebuilt, it all comes down to the level of rebuild they take. If you want a very high success rate buy OEM brand new. Anything less is more of a gamble, which I'm willing to take. Hell, I bought my truck with the 300 six because it's so easy to work on, so no biggie to me. I'm retired with lots of lifetime warranty parts on this baby....it just keeps paying dividends!!
I'm amazed every day how this truck just keeps starting and running with just a little maintenance.

 

OEM aluminized exhaust system components are the only things that come to mind that are considerably longer lasting than aftermarket components. I've had numerous OEM components fail with relatively low milage on them. Such things as alternators, water pumps, fuel pumps, a camshaft, shock absorbers, brake pads, hood and trunk lift assists, a/c compressor, etc., etc. So who really knows weather a rebuilt is poorer than OEM.

 

it all depends on if its a monday/friday part or a tueaday-thursday part. usually if they go bad fast its a monday/friday part. I dont think that it matters if its OEM or aftermarket.
If you want a show truck then I feel that OEM is the only way to go if you want it to be just like the showroom. But for daily use then its all a personal choice.

just my opinion.

 

Be wary of those pumps. Sure it may look nice but that doesn't mean squat about performance. Did you remove the backing palte to see how the impeller design was? While in there did you check the water passages for smoothness no rough casting or tight turns?

I bought a Weiand aluminum water pump for my 460 at Advance Auto Parts. I figured alumininum and high flow were good as the manufacturer stated. Well not really. When I examined the impeller it was no better than a stock design. The casting did not appear significantly more efficient.

After some research I concluded the Edelbrock high flow water pump was the best mechanical water pump for a 460 based engine. I returned the Weiand and bought an Edelbrock alumunum high flow unit. Upon disassembly and inspection it was clearly a better design. The impeller was certainly a higher quality than the cheapy stamped piece in the Weiand pump. The casting also appeared of a higher quality, designed to promote good coolant flow.

Moral of the story is that aluminum doesn't mean squat, only that the part is going to be lighter. It does not mean high flow. High flow comes from a good impeller design and some good thoguht and design going into the passages inside the pump, as well as quality casting and machine work.

 

I've had good luck with Duralast, but zero luck with the Valuecraft. I bought a value craft altenator and in 2 days it literally exploded. They gave went ahead and gave me a Duralast gold since they felt sorry for me.

I also had a Valuecraft battery that completely went dead in 10 months.

 

I've had great luck with duralast and all associated AZ/ Auto Palace/ Pep Boys/ etc. parts. Seeing that that I am young and all my wrenching time has been on a high school, college, or newly wed budget I save my nickles and dimes on accessories so I can call Summit for the serious parts.

In the times I have had failure there were no issues with exchanging it for a new part, even with moving to other parts of the country. Since I was working on old clunkers I had purchased not everything under the hood was kosher, and if I found a chronic part failure I would dig deeper and find the part was failing because of something else in the system. I'm a big fan of these cheap parts, and since I can whip altenators, starters and water pumps in and out with little issue I am willing to gamble on the quality of Duralast.

 

I wonder if any of the "Brands" actually do the rebuilding or remanufacturing. My guess is that some factory with essentially no name rebuilds starters, another does alternators, another does water pumps, etc. and they just put 'em the "branded" boxes. You'd think it would make a lot more economic sense and each "Brand" wouldn't have to have umpteen different assembly lines. Just like the hundreds if not thousands of suppliers who build the parts for new vehicles.

 

That's the way the brake shoes work. A guy I worked with used to be a forklift mechanic, and he had to go into a plant that made and relined brake shoes once in awhile. He said there was a conveyor belt there with every brand you could think of all on the same belt.

I worked with another guy who worked in a canned vegetable factory. All the brands of vegetables came off the same line. The higher priced brands had more women on the line picking out the bad stuff, while with the cheaper brands, more of the "bad" stuff went in the can.

I have a theory about the cheap car parts. A lot of car parts get changed, and they are really good. It may be a bad connection on the plug of the part, or during troubleshooting, it was changed out, and later the real problem was found. When these parts are turned in, these are the ones you want, and they will give good service if you happen to get one.

Then there are the ones that have had a lot of service, and the bearings or the brushes go bad, and they really are bad. These minor things get replaced, and they will give several more years of service when you buy them.

Then there are the ones that have the very unusual intermittent problems down in the windings, or some sort of circuit that checks good until it's put in service. These are the parts that get circulated and rebuilt over an over, and the problem is never really solved, and it just makes a lot of people mad over time. If they kept track of some sort of serial number on the unit, and it kept coming back in, it should be thrown away. But we know that probably doesn't happen.

 

Old Post I am aware (over a decade) but I just wanted to point this out in case others were looking for this information. I want to mention that you are correct that "lifetime warranties" are there for a reason and it's not because the parts fail. It's because the parts DON'T fail. Companies don't like to give away free products, when they decide the terms of a warranty on a particular item they come up with how confident they are that the part WON'T fail within the time of the warranty. They don't want to have to fulfill warranty requests and lose money. If a company is willing to say something has a lifetime warranty then I am willing to bet it's because they are confident that no one will make a warranty claim in that time frame otherwise it'd start costing them money to fulfill warranty requests.

Lifetime warranties exist to get you to buy the item. The manufacture is making the claim that their product is so good you wont need to replace it and thus are given a "lifetime warranty". the company is taking the gamble that only a small percentage of their customers will ever either use it or need it.

Car manufacture warranties work the same way.

 

I don't find the above to be really true. We all know most parts will not last forever, they naturally wear out. So theoretically they will be warrantied eventually. Like brake shoes. I think they "play the game" like you would in Las Vegas, betting that years later when the part does fail, the car is in the junkyard, has a different owner that doesn't have the paper work, or has the original owner who has lost the paper work and can't even remember what store they bought the part from.

And then there is the frustration game. Been there done that, and they do lose customers this way. They may warranty a part, but the part is fairly difficult and expensive to replace. So after you claim your warranty several times and get tired of all the work replacing the part, you go somewhere else. This game eventually gets a store chain in trouble after a few years, I think we can see this happening with some of the stores and their reputation, even though they still have "lifetime warranties".