Most manufacturers will obviously buy-in many of their components, as someone has already pointed out there is a good chance a pattern axle will be made in the same factory as those of top kart manufacturers. Really with a component like an axle there are probably very few variables, only really the steel grade and wall thickness, it’s highly unlikely any kart manufacturer has an exclusive on a specification not available to others. Really the only concern is making meaningful comparisons, is what your supplier calls a medium axle the same rigidity as what Tony Kart call a medium, there’s a good chance it’ll be very similar and given you can tune the stiffness with hub length etc. it probably makes very little difference to ultimate performance. The only real problem comes when you try making comparisons to others running the same chassis because you all might think your running a soft but yours might be more like their medium. Worse still you have a couple of genuine axles and one pattern, so you might think you have soft, medium and hard but really you have two soft’s and a hard. Obviously this is no different to buying axles from multiple pattern sources. However yet again those different pattern suppliers might have there axles made in the same factory so again might actually be the same. I guess that’s the problem, chances are these parts are probably the same but it’s that slight element of doubt that convinces many to pay a premium for the genuine factory-item because it removes that one potential variable from their set-up
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