Date:         Tue, 19 Feb 2002 17:34:27 -0500
Reply-To:     The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         The Bus Depot <vanagon@BUSDEPOT.COM>
Subject:      Re: Water pump manufacturers
In-Reply-To:  <3C72B8C1.79158072@postoffice.pacbell.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

> I'm shopping for a water pump (p. no. 025 121 010C) for my '89
> Gl.  Does anyone
> have any comments about the quality of pumps made by the following?
>
> Hepu
> Laso
> Graf
> GMB


The problem with this sort of question is that the answers will be far from
scientific.  For example, if one person had a GMB pump fail, he's likely to
respond that GMB sucks, even though his sample size was 1.  You would need
to tabulate a ton of of responses to glean anything remotely useful. And
even then, the results would be meaningless unless you knew how many of each
brand were in use.  Laso, for example, is not a big name in the U.S.
anymore, so you would expect to find few reports of defects simply because
so few are in use.  If Hepu had the same number of defect reports as Laso,
this would actually translate into a much lower failure rate by percentage,
because so many more of them are in use.

I can tell you that, having sold hundreds of these pumps, I have seen no
significant difference in reliability between the various name brands.
(There are Chinese made ones that I have not sold so I can't comment on
those.)  This is not exactly a scientific study either, but at least it's
based on a sample size of hundreds of pumps rather than a few. While we
normally ship Hepu (which is German made), we have in the past also carried
every other brand you mentioned except for GMB, plus a few more
(Annex-Teknik and Volkswagen), and the return rate on all of them has been
equally low.  Ironically, the only brand that seemed to have a slightly
higher percentage of defects (by a very slim margin, probably statistically
insignificant) was VW's own brand.  I generally shy away from the Graf's,
because they are Italian made whereas the Hepu's are German.  But frankly
this is more for marketing reasons - Hepu has the magical "Germany" word on
the box that makes people smile when they open their Bus Depot order - not
because I've found the Graf's to be inferior. Also, judging from the
castings, I suspect that many of them come from the same factory anyway.
For example, the last shipment of "German" labeled Annex-Tekniks I saw
before their major U.S. distributor went bust (about a year ago) looked
identical to the "Italian" labeled Graf's.

So I think you'd probably be equally safe with any of the brands.  If you
prefer a German brand, go for the Hepu; it's reliable and not expensive.

- Ron Salmon
  The Bus Depot, Inc.
  (215) 234-VWVW
  www.busdepot.com

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