Yes! :lol:
I’m kinda surprised to hear you say that, at least to me they seems to do more R&D than most other aftermarket parts companies(except maybe grimmspeed). From what I have seen Killer bee parts also are very high quality and made in the USA. I’m not a fan of EL headers but their 321 stainless header is been proven to make good gains over others.
At the end of the day it’s all prersonal preference though. RCM has a proven track record
lol
of making good parts.
While you are in there I would at least throw in a brand new OEM oil pick up(or an RCM unitnif they make one), they do have a know issue of cracking at the braze joint.
Don't want to get into it too much because it's a pretty unpopular opinion amongst the community, so my thoughts get flamed back reaaaal fast, but Killer B is using fear mongering as a result a limited quality issue on cars in 2006 or so.
There really isn't a huge issue of failing oil pickups. The pickups have been the same since 1992 when the WRX first came out, and all of a sudden once Killer B starts business there is some HUGE INHERENT ISSUE. There was a small batch of poorly quality pickups, and they latched on to the market to scare everyone into thinking they needed a new pickup.
Even in the description of their product on their website they have this:
"We have all heard the horror stories. You’re just driving down the road minding your own business and then boom your engine blows without warning"
That's not scientific, that's just BS marketing to make you think you need to buy something to operate your car normally.
The kind of failure seen at the brazing of the pickups is all due to vibration. Not heat cycling. The metal the pickup is made from has no issues expanding and contracting, and the brazing is just fine. The kind of vibrations your oil pickup will see depending on a LOT of things, driving conditions included. If you have solid engine mounts, urethane bushings everywhere else, solid crank dampers, and all you do is drive to and from work.. you may have a hell of a lot more vibration and such in your engine than a factory vehicle. Now, if you have all of those things and all you do is race the car (read: change RPMs very rapidly), then the engine is not subject to a constant barrage of vibration and resonance. The ever changing RPM never allows for certain components to vibrate and their natural resonant frequency. OEMs have a lot of design factors like this and control of other components to be able to make something that won't rip itself apart like the Tacoma Bridge.
This is just an example of course.
So yeah, basically because there isn't any information from Killer B on the way their pickup improves the use case of the factory one, the reason they fail aren't the reasons the community (and likely Killer B, but I cannot confirm this) says they commonly fail, and the fear mongering way of marketing, Killer B has lost my business for pretty much everything they sell.
That also being said, I am a bit overly anal about modifications. I like to have a "before" case and "after" case for everything to be able to confirm empirically something has changed for the better. So I have no problem running factory components until I have a set of data that shows how the factory oiling components are doing. I also don't mind spending a bunch of money on a new baffle only to see it doesn't do anything. Now everyone else will know, and there's not a whole lot of dispute with the data. Just how I go about things I guess. The money spent is worth the knowledge gained.
But yeah, Killer B. No good in my eyes. Will the pickup work? I mean yeah, I'm sure.. but so does my factory one.
