Me Again wrote:
The failures of the early CP4's both 1 and 2's was the piston with a roller follower getting turned sideways to the pumps cam lobe. Bosch was unwilling to pay the holder of a patent to keep the piston from turning in the bore.
This may be the Edelbrock patent that Bosch was unwilling to pay royalties to use.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6473964B1/en
Bosch unwilling to pay license fees for patents sounds like a familiar pattern with Bosch.
Examples in the power tool industry include:
1. Bosch cleverly invented the use of automotive air bag pre charged gas cartridges to stop the motion of table saw blades if an operator's hand made contact with the blade. Bosch's design was actually preferable to the competitor's blade stopping technology which destroyed the teeth of the saw blade in order to stop it. Bosch's air bag cartridge design saved the blade, and saved the fingers.
The problem was, the flesh detection technology that Bosch utilized to sense when the fingers were about to be cut was already patented by the competitor, called Saw Stop, which introduced the entire concept of safer table saws to market. Bosch built upon that idea, and introduced an improvement to the blade braking aspect, but Bosch refused to license the flesh sensing aspect from Saw Stop.
Bosch lost every legal appeal in the multi year court battle that ensued, and Bosch was ordered to stop sale and pull all their "Reaxx" table saws off the US market. It's too bad, because had Bosch been willing to simply pay the license fee, Bosch would likely have outsold SawStop, because the cost of the blades that some woodworkers use exceed $200, versus $49 for an air bag cartridge.
2. Another example... Bosch once again very cleverly innovated a radically new design of sliding compound miter saw, that used an articulating axial glide arm instead of friction guide rails that typical sliding compound miter saws slide upon. Bosch's glide arm literally floats the saw head above the work, like a robotic arm functions in an automotive factory. No other powered miter saw on the market comes even close to the unique utility of the Bosch design.
However, when you buy this saw, the saw head will have a plastic blank cover plate where the laser guide beam would otherwise be located, and where indeed Bosch has a laser in every similar saw sold around the world except in the United States and Canada. Why is this? Because Bosch was unwilling to pay the license fee to whoever patented the use of a laser guide beam on a sliding compound miter saw.
This seems silly to me. Even the cheapest Chinese Harbor Freight sliding compound miter saws that cost a fraction of what the Bosch model costs... have a laser guide. The Harbor Freight saw of the same cut capacity, with the laser, costs $129 on sale. Bosch's equivalent costs $700... with no laser, only a blank cover where the laser otherwise would be, and in fact is in markets other than North America.
So I believe it when I read that Bosch doesn't like paying license fees for other patents, even when Bosch has already incurred the development and manufacturing costs to incorporate the patented feature in their products already.
