Should people buy Fake Chinese PF motors?

[Newest_Tech320]

Do you think it is a good idea to buy fake chinese pf motors. I bought two fake buggy motors and large motors. If you want the link, send me a private message.

Thanks

[Friscorays]

No.

[The Neighborhood Merchant]

Probably not unless you have proof that they are reliable and last for a while. Plus it will always make you feel better knowing you got the real deal. 

[Vindicare]

I don’t like buying the stuff, but I know a fair amount of people do. I would only go with genuine LEGO, even though it may be harder & more expensive to buy these days. 

[MAB]

Why? Genuine ones are not that much more expensive.

[Cwetqo]

For now. But PF is EOL-ed this year and those motors may become harder to get. True, there will be C+ parts, but, as we know, those are 100% replacable, besides that, a lot of fan made MOCS are designed for PF.

And RC motors are already very expensive.

I always bought only original LEGO electronics (except Sbricks and Buwizz), but this may change if PF will become too hard to get.

[MAB]

I've never bought or tested the fake LEGO motors, but have bought fake servos for other projects. They are fine, so long as you don't expect absolute precision and so I'd imagine fake LEGO ones are similar to regular LEGO ones in quality of the motor. Although if anyone is willing to use fake motors due to costs, they might as well go for fake parts too. That said, even the fake motors are relatively expensive compared to plain / uncased motors of the same size/power. So you could just buy some uncased ones and glue lego attachments onto them if you don't mind a little soldering or wire twisting for connections.

[1963maniac]

The buggy motors are at least $100 US per one. There is content on EB about Chinese buggy motors. The buggy motors were found to be more or less equal. Servo, I don't know. But the servo motors are not currently available on Lego shop. Personally. I'm glad these motors are available but, it also irritates me.

 

Edited September 29, 2020 by 1963maniac

[ShaydDeGrai]

I think it really varies with the application.  If you're just looking for a simply power source/dumb switch/motor scheme to make something spin, you're probably fine.  If you're looking at more of a mindstorms application (servos, shaft encoders, electronic switching, some form of smart-brick controller, etc.) you're best off going with the genuine article.  Admittedly genuine Lego stuff is pricy, but what your paying for is precision resistance load balancing (to make sure you don't hurt any electronic circuitry the device ultimately attaches to), thermal profiling (to make sure that the device won't overheat and cause a fire even under most fringe conditions) and high precision molding, crafting and assembly.

That said, I used to run a Lego based robo-lab (grades K-8) and we made a lot of our "starter" motors and battery packs ourselves using cheap, uncased motors, battery holders and switches from an educational supply house.   We'd found that buying third party "lego compatible" motors wasn't really worth it as the cost saving wasn't that great but the quality tended to vary (even between batches from the same supplier).  We figured if we were going to compromise quality to save money we should _really_ be saving money so we ditched the "lego compatible" stuff in favor of raw parts and manual labor.

We could get about half a dozen basic motors (depending on motor specs) for the price of one genuine Lego motor (and the battery holders were dirt cheap compared to the genuine article).  To make Lego compatible housings for them, we'd hollow out and decapitate Duplo bricks and glue regular plates on the top and bottom.  We also had a CNC machine that could bore a perfectly centered hole down the middle of a 2L technic axle to deal with the shaft.  These worked fine as a "separate but equal" source of power/motion for people who were just starting out (and would occasionally do things that could damage a motor).  The direct drive was rarely an issue (and gave us an excuse to talk about speed vs. torque and gear ratios), we just moved the gear box outside the motor housing and let kids build their own.   We never mixed this stuff with the "real" stuff, but it worked well enough for lab and teaching purposes.  Not counting labor (which, thanks to the availability of grad students was basically free), these were cheap enough to consider disposable and drastically reduced the number of genuine Lego motors we were burning through each year.  Once we had confidence that someone knew what they were doing, they'd graduate to getting to work with the genuine article, but our DIY stuff was fine for the masses.

[MAB]

38 minutes ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

To make Lego compatible housings for them, we'd hollow out and decapitate Duplo bricks and glue regular plates on the top and bottom.

That's a good tip. I have built casing before from 1xX bricks, but these tend to make the whole motor unit quite bulky. They can be made slightly smaller using panels or brackets, but again still quite bulky.

[Toastie]

On 9/29/2020 at 1:42 AM, Newest_Tech320 said:

Do you think it is a good idea to buy fake chinese pf motors.

Well, where does TLG make them? I don't know, but I would be surprised if not there.

So fake yes. But Chinese?

Best
Thorsten

[Brickthus]

Maybe if you make Great Ball Contraptions, which use up a motor's life quickly, you would be able to keep genuine LEGO motors for other models.

I agree with the point above that best accuracy for Mindstorms etc. merits the best quality.  For rapid usage of life anything that is safe will do.  Therein lies the question; does it still meet the CE standard of toy safety?

My new aircraft (pic below) uses a single L-motor.  The take-off mechanism slows it down but doesn't cause the clutch to slip.  The function might not be used too often, so the life would be OK.  The rotor spin function is on all the time but is a lighter load.

It is best to design models so that the load results in the motor turning at half the no-load speed.  That is the point of maximum power transfer.

For train models, the motors can do 300mA but I stuck to 200mA per motor to prolong their life.  9-Volt trains had 2 motors where they had used a single motor as 12V trains.

Mark

[Toastie]

6 hours ago, Brickthus said:

Therein lies the question; does it still meet the CE standard of toy safety?

But Marc: Is this really a concern at 9V - far less than 1A?

Folks buying "Chinese" motors (this is where the high quality motors from TLG come from as well) may well be aware of issues? I don't know, but when I buy <10$ stuff from "there", I am ready to accept any surprises - but mostly the surprise is that the stuff works very nicely.

Best
Thorsten 

[dr_spock]

On 10/3/2020 at 4:03 PM, Toastie said:

Well, where does TLG make them? I don't know, but I would be surprised if not there.

So fake yes. But Chinese?

Best
Thorsten

Hoi Po appears to be the Chinese manufacturer of the DC motor inside my dead LEGO PF M-motors.

 

[MAB]

7 hours ago, Toastie said:

But Marc: Is this really a concern at 9V - far less than 1A?

Folks buying "Chinese" motors (this is where the high quality motors from TLG come from as well) may well be aware of issues? I don't know, but when I buy <10$ stuff from "there", I am ready to accept any surprises - but mostly the surprise is that the stuff works very nicely.

Best
Thorsten 

It is not so much the safety that is the issue but performance. Especially if you require two motors that are supposedly equal.

[Toastie]

18 hours ago, MAB said:

specially if you require two motors that are supposedly equal.

Is there any evidence for that? What about ordering 10 from one source and then pick the 2 matching ones? Still cheaper than two original ones ...

Also, making electrical motors is not necessarily rocket science - they have been around for some time now. I am just curious: Is there evidence or any reports for such issues on a larger scale? CE certification does not look that much (if at all) at "performance" but rather safety. We need to do these things in the lab, when our stuff goes out to companies that require CE (or the like) certification. The guy showing up then is mostly concerned with: Will this blow up and then potentially hurt/injure/kill you when he injects 2kV at sustained amperage, which is frying everything having a touch to ground potential. If not, you get the stickers.   

Best
Thorsten

[MAB]

I've used cheap (as in $1 each) for things like simple robot cars for kids coding clubs where two back wheels are powered by one motor each. If run over 10m or so you can really tell if they are not equal, since the car veers. It is not that big a deal, since you can just reduce the max voltage to the more powerful one until balanced.

[JaBaCaDaBra]

If you want to restore an oldtimer car you may need some parts.
Parts that aren't produced by the OEM for decades.
But there are some aftermarket producers that make those parts.
It's perfect normal that you use such parts to restore your car.

And now people start telling me that parts that are no longer manufactured by Lego shouldn't be bought from an aftermarket producer?
Instead you want us to buy overpriced motors without a use history from bricklink.

Really?

 

[MAB]

10 hours ago, JaBaCaDaBra said:

 

And now people start telling me that parts that are no longer manufactured by Lego shouldn't be bought from an aftermarket producer?
Instead you want us to buy overpriced motors without a use history from bricklink.

Really?

 

Nobody has said that. Just know what it is that you are buying.

[JaBaCaDaBra]

8 minutes ago, MAB said:

Just know what it is that you are buying

Motors, good working motors for less than a 10th of the price
NEW motors...
Probably with the same DC motor inside as the OEM motor.

[Toastie]

11 hours ago, MAB said:

f run over 10m or so you can really tell if they are not equal, since the car veers.

Hmmm - I had the same issue (regularly) with original LEGO motors as well, in the days when I was building autonomously operating "robots". As you said, key was to detect any "off" from set-point as fast as possible without over-steering - which got me knee-deep into the PID world (which basically eliminates that problem - and is total fun to play with!). I had this issue even on Spybotics PBricks with two built in motors. I believe that many "tolerances" add together to cause such behavior - in addition of course to pure motor operational margins. And the less power they have, the more it shows.

@dr_spock: Nice website they have! Thanks for sharing the link!

Best
Thorsten   

[MAB]

15 hours ago, JaBaCaDaBra said:

Motors, good working motors for less than a 10th of the price
NEW motors...
Probably with the same DC motor inside as the OEM motor.

So buy them. Nobody else cares if you want to buy and use fake LEGO, whether it is motors or other parts. You won't be allowed to talk about them here, as this site is for genuine LEGO only.

[Verodin]

53 minutes ago, MAB said:

You won't be allowed to talk about them here, as this site is for genuine LEGO only.

That's not very realistic anymore. I've been keeping my eye open for M motors and they've been out of stock for months(!!!). So yes I would buy fake motors, simply because that's the only thing you can actually buy (ignoring the official ones from 3rd parties who charge a  ridiculous amount for them, also not a real option). And yet there are old official sets and lots of MOCs that use these motors. What you're implying is that you're simply out of luck to talk about it on eurobricks, even if you just want to get an old set back up and running. And when PF is officially discontinued? How will that be handled? What are you going to tell those people?

[Toastie]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

You won't be allowed to talk about them here, as this site is for genuine LEGO only

And this is what I found and still find a little - lets called it short-sighted. Not because you phrased it - because it is the law (broken many times!) here.

I know that if such things are allowed per se that all bragging and cussing and shouting may begin - as self-discipline seems to have become an ever increasingly though "feature". And there would be no handle to cut it off. With a rule in place, that is much easier.

But: The moment we close our eyes to what is going on out there, each attribute we assign to TLG/LEGO in discussions conducted here become simple self-criticism or self-promotion. I believe it is always good to watch out and carefully share some of these observations. Again, such observations or even comments going along with them should be phrased carefully as this is indeed a LEGO forum.

Just because we look away or don't look at all - does nor make things disappear. What I don't want to happen is that people turn entirely away from TLG because they can get almost same quality stuff somewhere else for far less money. I also believe that the die-hard community - grown-up with LEGOs and completely inherited the whole family-owned business story and willing to pay whatever price tag is on the box - may become smaller and smaller over the next decades.

I would like to be on track with what else is out there - certainly also to help this community here to become even more powerful.

But oh well - just my two cents worth nothing.

Best
Thorsten

[JaBaCaDaBra]

1 hour ago, MAB said:

this site is for genuine LEGO only.

Ow well, so cutting bricks, painting, 3D printing bricks, Sbrick, Buwizz, PFbrick are all forbidden...
@Zerobricks interesting subject isn't it? Buwizz will be expelled

@MAB is it obligatoire to destroy mine now?

And where does it end?
With buying worn motors or Buggymotors for a price beyond any normal sense.

You should know that I don't like the kind of chinese sellers that copy mocs or Lego sets too.

But here we are talking about motors that are no longer produced..
I wish those chinese could also produce good working servomotors but here it goes badly wrong