Next time you order engine pistons from another country perhaps you might be better off buying them locally after reading this poor man’s tale.
According to Reddit User PM_Me_Sustromming earlier yesterday (Mar. 27,2019) he came across a post from his friend on Facebook of him sharing his tale of woe about how customs royally screwed him over by drilling literal holes into engine pistons he ordered from overseas. If you know a lick of anything about engine parts it’s that one doesn’t simply weld the holes shut on engine pistons after someone damages them like this. The pistons are, at this point, piston-shaped paperweights. Check out the sorry looking pistons for yourself in the Reddit thread below.
Somebody posted this in a FB group I’m in. Is it legal for customs to drill through a piston? What grounds could this be based on? from r/Cartalk
Having watched more than my fair share of customs shows on Youtube, mostly from United States Border Patrols and some Canadian border patrol shows from real-life agents, I do know that customs does not mess around when it comes to finding drugs, contraband, and the like. With teams of specially trained dogs at their disposal, millions of dollar of X-ray machines in use 24/7, and a trained eye for suspicious persons acting…suspiciously, they are literally the country’s first line of defense against foreign drugs coming into their home country. They don’t muck around.
As such, and according to several Redditors in the comments section, they can do almost anything they want to a package if they suspect there might be drugs inside. With illegal drugs manufacturers becoming more and more sophisticated, stuffing drugs in the insides of an engine piston is well within the realm of possibility. If I remember correctly, one Chinese cigarette smuggler lined a coffee machine to the brim with cartons of cheap cigarettes just to make it past customs. They didn’t.
With a carte blanche to do whatever they want, they also have the right to not pay back anything they damage. If they had to reimburse every single piece of damaged property, there would be less likely to damage something expensive and smugglers would stuff something as priceless as authentic Ming vases just to get cocaine into our borders.
Pistons are expensive. Pistons even for something as small as a Civic, like these Spoon ones, can cost upwards of $2,000 and then some.
It sucks, it really sucks. But until drugs stop pouring across our borders, regular Joe’s can’t do anything about car parts customs damages.
Source: Reddit
