Folks Of Interest Fram & Autolite belly up?

Several decades ago, Consumer Reports magazine did a comparison test on several different brands of oil filters and Fram came out as being one of the best. Go figure....!

 

Jack do you think some of these Brands along with their hard ***ets (manufacturing facilities, equipment and inventories) will sold in such a way as the Brands can continue as a stand alone company or part of another company?
Dan

 

No, probably not. with the accusations of "creative bookkeeping" (Fraud), those individual brand ***ets could be tied up in criminal and/or civil litigation for years.

 

When accountants figure, figures lie...

 

Curious what NGK plug number you're using, as I've found several.

 

NGK 7373. BBF engine. I’ve been in a spark plug hunt for ages as Autolite hasn’t made AF-32 plugs in decades, so I’m relying on NOS for my Boss engine.

 

Brands will get sold off and someone will start printing labels and filters with the name brand on them again and the consumer won’t even notice.

 

These brands are popular and profitable. They are all made in China so the supply will continue unless they can't emerge from bankruptcy. But there will be empty shelves unless the exporter gets paid. It's a privately held company so it's future is nebulous unless they can find a Shining Knight. Maybe Warren Buffet who has made major bucks from his acquisitions.

 

My application is Edelbrock heads on a FE Ford. Edelbrock recommends BKR5E and/or 7938, but I've also found 7390 and BKR5EY.
Is the 7373 a new style plug, or a new number of an previous plug? Thanks.
Bob

 

Not all of them, for example I've seen fram oil filters made by hastings. I think it just depends on the application or how old the stock is. I still won't run them on anything though haha.

 

Yes - see if you can find it on Ebay. Those sellers don't seem to care. But it did take me 3 orders one time to get someone to ship to CA. The first 2 sellers just cancelled the transaction and refunded the money without explanation.

 

Autolite still has a couple of midwest US factories, but most are made offshore.

The history of the 'big three' US spark plug manufacturers is interesting. Albert Champion founded his namesake company in 1905, but control rested with his financial backers so he left in 1908. He looked up William Durant who was building Buicks at the time and Durant backed him for the 'Albert Champion' company. There was a court battle over the names, and his company (by now part of the newly-formed General Motors) was renamed AC...

Autolite was formed in 1901 and eventually produced all sorts of electrical parts successfully. By the mid-'50s they were aggressively marketing their spark plugs and had a lot of success in racing. If you go back and look, Autolite decals were everywhere on US racer's cars. No less of a GM guru than Smokey Yunick picked them as his first choice for performance applications, with AC second and Champion a distant third.

In the late '50s Ford started making a concerted effort to reduce maintenance cost on their cars. Features like 'lubed for life' suspension/steering and aluminized exhaust appeared in 1960. Now Ford had used Champion spark plugs for decades up to this point but was unhappy with their longevity. Autolites held up longer, so Ford bought the spark plug and battery divisions (along with the name) from Autolite in 1961 with the remainder of the company being renamed the Prestolite Corporation. They quickly became the OEM plug in Ford products and Ford aggressively marketed them into the replacement market. Champion suffered a double whammy; not only the loss of OEM sales to Ford, but also a much-diminished share of the aftermarket. AC suffered too, but not as badly as they remained as OEM at GM. Complaints from Champion and AC resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit being filed by the Feds which Ford eventually lost (I guess being too good can be a problem) and the Autolite plug division (plus the name) was sold to Bendix in 1973 which is when Ford switched to the 'Motorcraft' name.

Ford continued to buy plugs from Autolite for OEM use (with Motorcraft branding on them) but Autolite was p***ed around due to all the corporate mergers and whatnot, having multiple parent companies. Somewhere along the line, they let quality slip, and rather badly. Ford started having warranty issues with plug failures on new cars in the late '70s. There was a period for a while that if you bought a set of 8 of either brand, chances were good that at least one would fail by 10K miles (I know it happened to me). Apparently Autolite didn't address the problem, so Ford went back into the spark plug business and once they had enough capacity to supply more than just themselves they aggressively re-entered the aftermarket. This was very nearly a repeat of the '60s and they were warned off by the feds. Motorcraft plugs disappeared from most parts houses for a few years, eventually re-appearing with nearly zero advertising this time. Applications are now limited however. I'll note that if you run into NOS Motorcraft plugs from the transition era, the Autolite versions have all-white insulators, the Ford-built Motorcrafts have blue rings on them.

Autolite did address the quality problems eventually, but for a while they were offering 'lifetime warranty' on them to lure customers back. Yeah, they got that bad....

 

Thanks for the history lesson.

 

I have a nice big sheet of fabric-reinforced nitrile rubber, and when I have a diaphragm fail in a fuel pump that is rebuildable, I just cut out a new one, "manufacture" a new fuel pump rod out of a 1/4 inch bolt, and Bob's yer uncle.

 

You might be right. Maybe someone in the company saw the writing on the wall and decided to do a cash grab. Maybe it was just a cash grab.

 

Excellent history
Thanks
Dan

 

Yep, I was collateral damage from a situation like that some years ago. At first, those people avoided us like the plague, but when I raised hell with one of them for deliberately not speaking to me (instead asking my supervisor about me while I was right there), they were instructed to at least acknowledge us, and by the time the building was completely shuttered they had gotten to know us very well - and recognize (probably for the first time) what they were destroying.

A friend of mine used to work at a cl***ical music radio station doing a popular Saturday night jazz program that had several spots on the dial. With coverage along the Maine coast and NH (as well as the internet), their programs were both popular and profitable. Unfortunately, their parent company made some bad decisions and went bankrupt, and the station was broken up and parted out to different media outlets, none of whom retained the cl***ical format. They weren't very nice, either; took him two years to get his jazz collection back, and they finally dumped it in his driveway while he was out.

 

Always had good luck with Autolite Sparkplugs. Seemed like they could handle fouling better than any AC.

 

I'm getting too old to crawl thru junkyard for thermostats and sparkplugs, but that day may return.

Last swap meet I went to in June.. dealers were going spot to spot buying any OEM original in box service parts. My brother and I knew something was happening...

 

Maybe we can get back to having a local shop that rebuilds starters and alternators, and putting kits in our wheel cylinders, etc

 

We have an excellent shop that rebuilds starters and alternators in my city.
Whenever I work on friends and family members' cars and these parts are bad, I bring them in to get rebuilt. I want the shop to stay in business, and I think rebuilt original parts are better than new Chinese components.
Although I imagine a lot of the rebuild components may be from that place.

 

I just bought some new NAPA Gold filters for my daily driver yesterday. Took off the same part number that I bought a year ago that was made in USA. The new one is made in China. They are not the same.

Different sized holes, different construction, etc.

 

Well, ****. I been using napa gold filters for as long as I can remember. I wonder if maybe the asian one is still high quality.

 

It looks to be a lesser filter than the older WIX made one. The piss off is I bought 3 at once. It will probably be fine for my daily, but I keep filters for all my stuff in stock and probably won't restock my NAPA gold stash with NAPA gold as I use them up.

 

High quality and Asian is an oxy*****.

 

No, I've dealt with sourcing of materials and products from China and other asian countries.

Just like anywhere else, there's good quality and not, depending on how much you're willing to pay. Cheap Asian products are prevalent in North America because of consumer price expectations and corporate greed in trying to reduce costs to increase profit margins.

 

The two stroke Electromotive Diesel Locomotives weren’t compe***ive in either Fuel Economy or emissions capability.

You can believe whatever your neighbor’s uncle’s cousin told you, but as an engine engineer all I can do is tell you what the Engineering community knows.

 

Toyota probably produces, with a few exceptions, the highest quality cars in the world.

Last I checked, they’re a Japanese company, and Japan is in Asia.

 

The days of USA of "Made in the USA" are fast fading away. VERY FAST.
Soon, very little will be available for older cars.

 

Nappa Gold were Wix until 2022/3. Their owners (GPC) started buying from China based on price.
You are correct, they are not the same quality. The standard Nappa filter was made in China back then and that is now branded as Nappa Gold. There are a number of quality brand filters that are now made in the same factory.