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Joe Connors said:
[blockquote]mbw said:
My feeling is , and this applies to any number of products. I have no problem with companies who produce products in Asia for purposes of obtaining a lower price point. However when companies like Leigh who produce items at the high end of pricing to all their competition I'm troubled.
The country of origin is not the issue. It is the specs of the item that is specified by the vendor to the manufacturer. Yes, the same factories produce Harbor Freight quality as they do high quality. It all has to do with what the manufacturer's customer ( ie. Lee Valley, Leigh Industries, ect) specifies. If they specifiy junk quality then they get junk quality. Its as simple as that! China is just as capable of producing extremely high quality goods as anyone else. They produce spacecraft which have to, by necessity, be made to very high tolerances.
[/blockquote] This is so true and people don't seem to realize it. I've been in factories using abrasives that had tolerances and specifications that very few companies in the US could hold. The flip side I've seen the other end of the spectrum just a few miles away. Example of the low end. The workers literally buy an abrasive belt from their boss each morning. If they take a bathroom break they take the belt off the backstand machine and take it to the bathroom with them or they lock it up. Another worker would be sure to steal it. The worker grinds gates off parts all day long and he is paid by the part. In the morning the belt is cutting fine and the gates come off with no excess heating of the part because the mineral is doing its job. As the day wears on the belt wears out. After 3-4 hours a decent plant worker would swap out with a new belt. Not these guys. They keep going. Eventually they hang a piece of plywood around their neck that goes against their chest. This is so they can push with the full weight of their body the part into the backstand belt so as to remove the gate. The part is not being cut off but burned off at this point. They don't care. As long as they can still remove metal and get that gate off, they keep going. They literally use the belt until just the backing is removing metal. No mineral is left at all. By now the parts take 4-10X longer to remove the gate and they get blue because of all the excess heat. The workers don't care. As long as they don't have to buy a new belt for the day. This is not a one off kind of thing either. The one plant we were in had 60,000 people grinding off gates. There are thousands of plants all over China with that number of workers doing the exact same thing.  The rub is if you want quality, you will NEVER get it for the lowest price. If you shop at Harbor Freight, you are paying the salary of that guy with the plywood hanging around his neck. You are not paying the salary of the guy that gets a fresh abrasive belt every 2-3 hours.
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I agree that Leigh's quick and honest response was excellent, but I don't agree with much of the opinion stated in this thread. Although quality merchandise can and does come from Tawain, I have little faith in the quality of goods from China. my 2 cents.
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mbw said:
I agree that Leigh's quick and honest response was excellent, but I don't agree with much of the opinion stated in this thread. Although quality merchandise can and does come from Tawain, I have little faith in the quality of goods from China. my 2 cents.
All of that Chinese stuff is no good. A country of 1.3 billion just can't do anything right. I will be very careful on all future purchases. Uhhh, guess where your electronics were mostly manufactured and assembled. Just one guess....
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When they have means to track back to an assembler, ie there is a serial number on the part like a phone or iPad, you can be assured that it is made right. They track that stuff and if a particular batch of products can be traced back to one assembler, they do it and they also penalize the company that hired that person. So if there is a serial number, you are good. If it is a non-numbered part, then good luck.
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I'm a little surprised at the outpouring of support for Chinese made goods.
Yeah, I have a lot of them, but there isn't much choice, they continue to systematically destroy our manufacturing base in ways we'd never allow any other country.
China manipulates their currency (to keep their exports artificially cheap). Of course, they don't have anything near what North America or Europe have for environmental controls, so we have to compete with manufacturers dumping God-knows-what into their environment. The labor market is akin to enslavement with children working alongside adults. Chinese businesses have been only too willing to adulterate pet foods and knowingly mislabel other goods. Oh, and let's not forget they are run by a corrupt communist party.
So yeah, country of origin is important to me. When I needed an inexpensive and light-weight air compressor I was happy to find one I could afford that was made in (of all places) Italy. When I purchased my Honda it was because the US-made content was high.
You know, this recession we're about to enter (which is going to make 2008 pale in comparison) is largely due to Americans rebelling. They have cash in their pockets (not as much as they once did, I'll grant you). But they don't want cheap Chinese merchandise (no matter the quality) at the expense of good paying American jobs.
I could get more political but will refrain.
"Links to news stories don’t cut it." MsNomer 3/2/24
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I only buy Chinese made products, when there is no alternative. True with electronics there is no choice. The competition and pricing is all over the place. Leigh makes unique high end tools which virtually never go on sale. If you want one of their unique products, you pay the price period. The guide bushing, a critical part of their RTJ 400 is made in China. Why to save $2 really. They could make here or in Canada, raise the price of the jig $10 an no one would care.
I wonder if Lie Nielsen had their plane irons made in China, if they would enjoy their current following.
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I think its refreshing Leigh responded as they did, this is modern reality. The globalization horse left the barn a long time ago; most if not all major domestic manufacturers have supply chains that reach into China and many other countries, either because of pricing pressure and that their competitors force the issue by sourcing there, or the fact that quality goods of various types are simply not manufactured on a large scale in the US. For example, many of Hock's plane irons are made in France, LV sources Narex chisels in the Czech Republic, and we think nothing of buying Italian bandsaws, Swiss carving tools or German Festools; these are assuredly not low wage countries. In my mind if the spec of a component is quality, and QC is enforced, China, and many other Asian countries, can make quality goods. Electronics and telecom are one example, there are certainly others.
As far as China itself is concerned, I am convinced that they are headed for a meltdown. The banking system is a hollow shell; the stock market is a joke (much more than the somewhat rigged game we call the NYSE), their economic and financial reporting is opaque and the workers' increasing wages are beginning to price themselves out of competitiveness; Foxcomm is starting to move (and planning bigger moves) into India and Vietnam where wages are lower. The government is struggling to maintain control over the economy and the workers. When this meltdown happens, its going to be ugly.
Things go in cycles. America has many, many advantages, innovation being the primary one, and that alone will serve us well in the long term. China is good at imitation and replication, not so much at innovation, the latter they make up for by blatantly stealing western intellectual property.
Credo Elvem ipsum etiam vivere
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Admiral said:
America has many, many advantages, innovation being the primary one, and that alone will serve us well in the long term. China is good at imitation and replication, not so much at innovation, the latter they make up for by blatantly stealing western intellectual property.
My concern is that there isn't enough innovation to compensate for the loss of blue collar jobs at least in the short to medium term, and there is a fairly large percentage of any population that isn't cut-out to be a scientist or engineer. These people have historically worked in manufacturing and manufacturing support. We need those jobs, at least until there are enough robots making things that we can all sit home and still enjoy new cars (compliments of the robots) ever 2-3 years.
"Links to news stories don’t cut it." MsNomer 3/2/24
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Someone (like me  ) still needs to program those robots. They also need fixturing to do the jobs they need to do. They also need repair and for every robot doing complicated work at least one programmer is needed for the off robot needs. At least that is the way it is where I work. We are innovating. The problem is that some of those innovations cost more than previous invented junk that is now copied from China and OUS. I'm kinda surprised Leigh jigs have not been copied.
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