Kinda going off Chinese import stuff..

[Winegrower]

they won't equalize... we are in decline.

That is equalization at work.

 

[RJSakowski]

You're talking about a country that can send rockets to the moon and put satellites in orbit. That isn't done with crappy machining. So what is the difference? The difference is the lack of quality control. Many US companies having products made often don't have a good quality system in place for in-process and final inspection in the country of origin. Furthermore, they don't have a process for stateside final inspection of product either.

I don't believe that the Chinese intentionally make bad machines. This is probably best indicated by the perception that you can get a very serviceable machine or a piece of junk from the same manufacturer. The difference is spotting the problems during the manufacturing process because once they move on to the next phase, they often become invisible

I have purchased a number of Chinese made machines from Grizzly that clearly hadn't been uncrated since they were put on the boat, even though Grizzly maintained that they were each inspected stateside. A proper final inspection doesn't mean simply, "yep, there's a machine in there". But what sets Grizzly a cut above HF is they at least have properly trained inspection teams over the pond. They still have to work on their in-process inspection, as indicated by the hidden defects many of us have discovered.

The Tormach mill that I purchased is a Chinese product and generally fairly decent. If anything, I would fault the design more than the workmanship but that is a strictly American design. There were some issues though like wires simply twisted together and taped on the coolant system motor and the cooling fan. I also had a spindle bearing fail early on and received a replacement spindle cartridge. The runout for the replacement cartridge was terrible, around .015". When the cartridge was balance, shallow holes were drilled in the end of the spindle to balance it but the burrs from the drilling process were never cleaned up so when the TTS tooling was used, the burrs would bias the tooling creating the runout.

For the most part, the portable tools that I have purchased in the past decade have been well made. This is also true for the electronic equipment purchased. I attribute this to better QC processes enforced by the American brand owners.

 

[addertooth]

Really all this could have been and was predicted long ago. As long as labor rates are significantly different for similar skills around the world, work will migrate to the lower cost producers. For example, we see India as a new low cost supplier of our hobby type equipment, but they are also solidly into software development.

The difficult and troublesome fact is that if you don't manufacture or produce the current generation, you can't design the next generation. A huge amount of US based design is really "specification" of what you want built next time.

Since there is no geographic, national or racial boundaries for creativity, this will continue until wages and productivity tend to equalize around the world.

So says me.

I largely agree with what you say. The only exception would be the regional differences in "expectation of what is an acceptable standard of living". In the USA and Europe, we expect water and electricity which runs 24 hours a day, with five-9s reliability. We also expect climate control for our homes. We expect easy transportation to and from work (which in the USA means usable roads and one car (or more) parked in front of our houses. Dare I mention we expect cell phones, TV shows on-demand, and pre-produced food available.

These things do not exist world wide, and the public in other places don't (yet) see them as the Minimum standard for lifestyle. They can live cheaper, and can have a good lifestyle (compared to their immediate neighbors) with a smaller income. A good example of this was mentioned earlier (software programmers in India). They will write programs at a much lower cost (and sometimes the end-results are hilarious, as they are unfamiliar with the English language in some cases). Until the standard of living is the same world-wide, there will always be cheaper places to "live". This will make the demand for salary smaller in those areas. It is hard to compete when the cost of living in some areas are markedly below 20 dollars a day, and yet you can get a computer programmer from those areas.

The cost of living differential has a strong effect on the wages demanded by the people who live there. Even here in the USA, when headhunters call me with a "job opportunity", I tell them my expected wages go UP, if it is in a region where cost of living is higher (coastal areas, or high-cost cities like New York or Denver).

 

[BGHansen]

I was a project engineer at General Motors and worked quite a bit with Chinese manufacturers. My impression was they made every attempt to make parts to the drawing, but back in the day lacked the experience of problem solving issues.

An example was a problem at the GM Shanghai assembly plant around 20 years ago. They were in the process of shutting the plant down because the nuts with a captured free-spin washer that secured the drop links to the stabilizer bars were breaking. They didn't break on the initial torque rundown, but popped after 12 hours or less. Their yard was full of cars needing nuts replaced and they had no idea what to do or how to figure out what the problem was.

I got called in to their problem solving meetings. The problem sounded to me like something called hydrogen embrittlement in the captured washer. Fasteners are typically plated/coated and cleaned ahead of plating/coating. Typically an acid wash is used. However, if a steel washer is acid-washed (all acids contain hydrogen) before plating/coating, it needs to be "cooked" at ~400 F after plating to boil the hydrogen out of the steel. Otherwise, the hydrogen can migrate into the microstructure of the steel which can lead to fractures when the part is subsequently put under load. The failure surfaces within 24 hours; no crack after 24 hours under load, no problem.

I mentioned that they should look at their stock dates and see if there was another date that could be used. Their failure rate was over 25%. The failure happened to be what we called a binomial distribution; it's either okay or not okay. I don't have the chart handy, but there's a stats chart that gives the number of samples that need to be tested based on failure rate to prove within a confidence level if you have fixed the problem or not. I recall the number of samples needing to be around 12 for 95% confidence with the 25% failure rate.

Take 12 nuts from each of your manufacture dates and run the drop links down on stabilizer bars. Come back 24 hours later and see if any have cracked. If they have, quarantine that stock date. It's what we called "prequalifying material". I had to elaborate on that term with them. "Guys, if you have lug nuts that don't want to run down on the wheel studs, take the lug nuts off line and run them down on a loose knuckle (assuming you've proven the studs are okay). Prequalify the lug nuts before taking them to the line". To us in the USA who'd been doing this for years, it was "Problem Solving 101". To my Chinese colleagues who lacked the experience, it was rocket science. They were super-eager to learn, a number of their lead guys came to the USA to train with our statistical engineering group and get some reps under their belt. We'd occasionally get some of their product in our audit area to review, they did a very fine job putting their cars together.

I also had some experience with low-level Chinese vendors who cared about profit, not so much about quality. I had a problem with peel and stick emblems literally falling off the car. We did a wet-out test and the parts failed. Then came the arguments that I don't miss as I recently retired. They'd do the same wet-out test and have the parts fail, but still wanted us to use them. . . "Guys, would you expect your company to print badges for you with a few letters missing from your name and call that okay? Of course not. General Motors will not accept cars in the field with the name plate "B ick". We are selling a Buick, not a B ick".

Summarizing, the Chinese can do as good of work as anyone on the planet. They (and any other country) can put out crap too. Depends on what's important to you. We used the line, "cost, quality and timing; pick two". If you want it for really cheap/quickly, don't expect high quality.

I've learned the buy once, cry once lesson over the years, but still forget it on occasion. A lot depends on my project and the accuracy needed.

Bruce

 

[addertooth]

BGHansen,

But the ultimate test is Who can make parts with less external quality control. Some societies have historically had good quality control (and production), without sending a team over to "enhance" their production. Those successful companies have already learned the key lessons, 50 years before, and include them in their standards of production. Those more capable companies do charge more.

I had an engineer under me whose previous job had been to help a Chinese semiconductor company fabricate a chip, which had a 50% failure rate when they came off their production floor. Even worse, they were not detecting the failed parts, and so the shipping cost to the US (and world market) was an issue. The parts were made under a US company, which previously had made the part. You can add to problems, all the future sales which were lost, when the customers had to seek a more reliable source.

Any culture which is new to making parts will have a serious problem with infant-mortality in their products. They frequently will not have taken the time to READ about what it takes to make a durable product.

 

[graham-xrf]

For @BGHansen and @addertooth I do agree.
I think that, in the absence of a coercive regulatory pressure, standards progressively slip as companies invent their own. At times, there are attempts to hang together with common standards on various technologies, but they are just as often a profit-motivated attempt to dominate a market. When needs must, like when a whole nation must pull together, standards are enforced by state coercion. From Napoleon to the Ministry for War. Arguably, even the full adoption of a standard unit of length in USA (1inch = 2.540cm exactly) was forced via the adoption of Johanson's gauge blocks, and the help of Henry Ford. Eli Whitney may have faked his first demonstration of interchangeable gun parts, but the intent was there, and he got it right in the end.

The South Bends, of which mine are example, were made for wartime need. They were made without frills. Nobody spent too much time grinding off casting joint flashings, and any surface that did not have to be machined was just painted. Yet in the same machines, they were built very strongly, and with no compromise in putting in precision where it needed to be. I suppose this is why my 70-year old machine could still turn precision parts. Probably not the first time military needs drives along the best engineering!

I am happy to mess with my stuff, to make them better, in effect putting some of my stamp on the Chinese kit.
One has to admire the way Stefan re-brands his kit. The originally Taiwanese Vertex rotary table, re-branded as "Optimum" in Germany, after some insane reworking into a no-compromise scraped up thing of beauty, gets a new nameplate.



Do something like that - after you have sufficiently "Americanized" your Grizzly, or Precision Matthews, or whatever.

 

[Shotgun]

One thing I have noticed. . . a thing that the American's didn't have the advantage of when taking over for the Europeans. . . is that Chinese companies read their online reviews. I have bought parts several times that had a particularly bad aspect called out several times in reviews. When I got the part, I could see that the problem had been addressed.

It has happened enough, that I pay attention to the dates on reviews of something I'm considering buying. If the review is a year or older, there is often a good chance that the problem will have been addressed.

. . . and sometimes I get paperweights.

 

[graham-xrf]

I still feel it a disappointment that the same trousers, but different pockets, is producing much of the planet's Teslas in Shanghai, while providing the next space launch vehicles in USA.

 

[addertooth]

All I can say is that his SF328 forms (where an American company has to disclose it's foreign interest), must be interesting for Elon Musk. For certain military-related contracts, a company must disclose all of it's foreign entanglements before any contract is awarded. If the foreign contacts are "too deep or entangled", it often serves as a reason to deny a contract.

 

[ericc]

You have to be so careful these days. There is so much junk floating around that you cannot take anything for granted. I am helping to tool up a new manufacturing facility, and we have decided to buy old used tools wherever we can, since we have had too many disappointments. I mentioned an imported plasma cutter that died after just one job. The facility manager told me to simmer down, since it paid for itself many times over with that job. There is no way that the importer will take that machine back on warranty or fix it. He just took it home and is still trying to fix it. Another problem with buying new tools off Craigslist these days is that the places you get them look so seedy with all the piles of new tools in cartons. Looks too much like a theft ring. Only old used tools unless it is an emergency.

These are indeed strange times. Soon, all the old tools will be gone, and we'll be dependent on Amazon and Reddit reviews.