Let's Talk The home truths about warranties and as a partner with Taipan, what you can do to get it right.
You might think we at Taipan don’t like receiving warranties, and you’d be right, I mean who would, they cost money and can often be hard to deal with……
The reality is, for Taipan to improve our product, we need customers to report problems.
We recently had an issue with K10 and K12MF1826As where the manufacturer had crimped the nuts on too high, so when the hose tail was attached to a male, it did not quite bottom out and seal. That is without a 24” shifter and a gorilla on the end of it. There must be heaps of gorillas out there as these tails have been in circulation for years and we had no idea there was a problem!
The problem was, however, eventually reported and the manufacturer has since redesigned the nut to eliminate any chance of a recurrence and in addition has replaced all existing stock.
A more recent issue has been with Taipan’s GH8.3MM Grease hose, this was a more difficult case as the actual issue was not clear and since no formal warranty cases had been receipted, didn’t look like there was even a problem to fix. There had been a couple of customers voice their opinion that the reusable shells were too loose on the hose, but no actual failures had been reported.
In August 2019, we carried out burst testing on our inventory of this product to see if there was any substance to the rumours and nefarious comments filtering though the rather shaky grapevine here at Taipan. The testing was done with Taipan branded fittings as well as some alternative brands, all passed burst testing at 10000psi +.
We made a design change that improved the performance to 16000psi. This was implemented as stock was depleted. Fast forward several months and the rumours persisted. We did a more in depth check on the batch codes of hose and hose tails (it is important to note here all world standards allow manufacturing tolerances) and found if you combined the worst case scenario of smaller hose ID and minor machining tolerances in the hose tails the “loose fit shell” could actually be replicated and if assembled without being mindful of tail insertion depth, could possibly fail.
To eliminate any possibility of failure, Taipan are now replacing all current stock of the old design shells with the newer version first manufactured in Aug 2019.
All grease hose tail stock with batch codes J1 J3 AND Z1 engraved on the shell are ok and are already modified.
If you haven’t got bored and stopped reading by now, you can probably see that if this issue had been reported as a warranty and the affected stock returned to Taipan for assessment, it would most likely have been fixed a very long time ago!
Taipan’s warranty process is very generous, we pay the freight to get the item back, and, in most cases give you a credit for the product even if it is not Taipan’s fault or it turns out to be assembly error or similar.
When we say our business is your business, we mean it. For us to provide you with ever improving product and service we rely on your input.
