Aliexpress/Ebay Mud Guard

[nttran98]

the red circled portion is a 3d printed insert that's added to the mudflap material. If you look closely at your picture, you already have the microcracks along the mesh on the side..

Mine ended up cracking completely after a few weeks, here's what it looked like the day after install.

I want to say you have the old design, but the big difference is the 3d printed insert is now much thicker and covers more of the mudflap.

I would keep an eye out for that if it develops. Support at mega chip told me that the flaps that cracked were supposedly a part of a bad batch, but the design change makes me think not.

Easy way to check is to push the flaps back and if you see the cracks spread they're no good.

Its not an insert anymore, its a flexible rubber with no seems, and the holes work very well with the push button retainer clip. definitely not the exact same design and I think its better.

 

[Cueyo]

Hi all, Elliott from Megachip here. Jeff from FX3D Design sent this thread my way. We're not normally active on forums, but I figured this one deserved a response.

First: yes, these appear to be knockoffs of the Megachip FL5 Type R splash guards — right down to our product photos, which have been edited in some of the listings.

I have to admit, there's a small part of me that's flattered. My designs got copied and made it all the way to AliExpress? I already bragged about it to my friends.

Jokes aside, several of the details are distinctly Megachip: the 45-degree outer AeroEdge, the top-edge angle, bottom guard profile, and general proportions. Those aren't arbitrary. I've spent a lot of time refining our guard geometry, including CFD work originally done around these features on an S2000.

I also want to clear up something mentioned earlier in this thread: these are not coming from the same factory that makes Megachip guards.

Megachip rubber guards are made and assembled in the US. We're a four-person company in Lake Zurich, Illinois. It's me, my brother who's our full-time engineer, an assembler/packer, and another engineer who works with us remotely. Our rubber material is extruded in Dayton, Ohio, and most of our tooling is made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We don't have an overseas manufacturer producing our rubber guard sets or tooling.

Regarding the cracked Megachip fronts shown earlier in the thread: that isn't something we consider acceptable. If anyone has a set that cracks like that within our one-year warranty, contact us and we'll replace it free of charge. If it's been more than one year, we can get you heavily discounted replacements.

We did revise the FL5 front design over time. The current version uses a substantially more robust 3D-printed vent insert. That insert has some surprisingly specific geometry: it's designed to maintain airflow through the factory vent while disrupting debris coming through it to reduce what reaches the paint. There's more engineering in that little piece than it probably looks like.

As for the AliExpress guards themselves: I bought a set.

From the photos, they appear to be injection molded. That's an interesting advantage of whoever is producing them because injection molding can make a lot of sense once you're producing enough pieces to justify the tooling. At Megachip's current volumes, manufacturing our products the way we do in the US results in very different economics, so I'm not going to pretend we can sell our current FL5 set for $40–$80 and have the numbers make sense.

And I'm also not going to claim the knockoffs must be terrible just because they're knockoffs. They might be perfectly decent guards. Once the set arrives, I'm genuinely interested in putting them next to ours and seeing exactly what they copied, what they changed, what material they're using, and whether they improved anything.

Competition is competition. Someone thought our design was worth reproducing, so we'll take that as motivation to keep making ours better.

At the end of the day, we're just trying to make the best splash guards we can, and update them when there's room for improvement. We warranty what we sell, and so far a lot of owners seem to really like them.

P.S. Since price has understandably come up in this thread, we're also about to launch a B-Stock section for cosmetically imperfect Megachip sets. They have minor scratches/scuffs that don't pass our normal QC but are functionally fine, and they'll be 25% off retail.

Great response, I want to say my experience with mega chip has been great. Receiving an updated product was pretty neat too, especially seeing the changes made and how much better the guard felt.

Look forward to seeing how the knockoffs compare.