[Marci]

Wow... knew I should've signed on last night and checked this thread... */me starts brushing the empty shell cases into a tidy pile in the corner*

Though I admire Thermochill's persistence in keeping production in UK, the economic forces are working the other way.

Well I'll explain some of the reasoning for that... back in the early days when we (as Over-Clock UK) first started with watercooling, radiators were the single component we ALWAYS ran out of. The only choice those days was BlackIce and their distributor network wasn't quite as pleasant as it is these days. We were having to buy rads in from the US & Germany, and finding our rads frequently being held hostage by either the supplier or customs. We'd go from sales-thru-the-roof to nothing solely because we'd been fed a load of crap regarding our radiator orders and would often be sat without any for months on end. This started to have the knock on effect of giving us a bad name for never having any stock of the goods we advertised, and rarely being able ot provide full kits as we never had any rads.

Back then also, the shipping costs escalated the price of the rads too much to import them into the UK unless bought in unrealistically large quantities - much the same problem that others are experiencing now with ThermoChill rads overseas...

The solution to this issue was ThermoChill. UK Produced radiators, no importing, no sitting round with a middleman ensuring you your order had been shipped when it was still sat in their warehouse with half of it missing as they'd swiped it to give to a bigger customer... if there was a rush on a line of rads, no waiting months for restocks... we can have them back on the shelves within 24hrs these days...

This filled a nice hole... list the UK Manufacturers in the watercooling scene... you only need one hand. Hell you don't even need a whole hand of digits... so anyone foolish with a jigsaw and lost a finger - join in!!

We as a company like, admire and respect ethics that work and mean something when applied directly to your own circumstances. Cathar's ethics in our eyes are impeccably perfect and we'll happily stand alongside him on the value of ethics by his definition. It is these ethics that form the relationship of trust between us... we won't work with unethical people - we've inadvertantly done so in the past but as soon as we've become aware we've severed all associations rapidly. A gentleman's agreement can go a long way...

Thing is not posting the info on forums will not get you anywhere really. Once you release the product they will copy it anyway. Might take a little longer though.

The initial surge on a product is enough to cover development and prototyping costs... if the clone gets on the market first, or just early enough after initial launch, it can leave those costs lingering which prevents further work from being done... can't take the next step til you've completed the first step, and each step involves covering the costs for that step. If the release of the clones can simply be stalled by withholding information, that's enough to at least ensure we get the cost of prototypes back from the initial orders. The info and details can be let loose in the first reviews of the product, which will be enough to drive the product for the first month of it's life... "Might take a little longer" is the aime of the game at the moment - stall `em!

Another problem with China seems to be spam and hacking. 99% of the port scans recorded on my firewall and 75% of all spam I recieve is from there... China is not exactly high on the ethical bandwagon on any level.

Heh - tell me about it! The servers hosting thermochill.com and over-clock.com both get DDoS'd on a regular basis, usually from the same army of zombies, usually to cover up a huge portscan from the same origination... the amount it's cost in FloodGuard protection this year alone is staggering compared to previous years.

Its got nothing to do with a bloody radiator design subforum, even though its a topic worth "discussion"....

Here you have four of the major players in the PC-Watercooling-Radiator-Production market... all giving their reasons behind why they think a rad-design subforum isn't going to be of much use to them as businesses... and that reason is purely a lack of ethics amongst those who can obtain access to that info... it is related, but the personal attacks have dragged things sideways a touch. Bear with... we'll get back on track