Thread: Made in China

Originally Posted by Christos

I do have a question that seems to be missed a little bit here.

If the market was only in China and only for Chinese do you think they will be having this discussion on quality of tools? Lets go a little further and point out that currently China has been in the middle of an expansion of it cities and part of that expansion involves people building structures. What quality of tools do they use as part of their jobs?

Hi Christos

You are assuming that all the tools produced in Chinese factories are available for sale outside China. This assumption ignores the issue that the tools for sale outside China are built to specifications of contractors in Western countries to meet a price. As I wrote before, Chinese factories can produce anything, but we get what they are asked to build for sale outside China. You should be "fighting" with the Western contractors rather than the Chinese factories.

Regards from Perth

Derek

I remember when i first started woodworking from underneath the old mans house in the mid 80,s and deciding which tool or machine we could afford we were always confronted with the cheap taiwanese as an alternative to the wellknown brands.The only thing was the taiwanese stuff was really all we could afford and we just had to put up with the poor build quality of a cheap bandsaw and work with it.Now fast forward 25 years into the future and when you go into places that sell woodworking machies you search out the taiwanese made machines because their build quality is so much better than the chinese made machines.
Alas the taiwanese have priced themselves out of the business in a way by getting better at what they do and improving their wages and conditions.This i feel will happen to the chinese in years to come when we go into a shop and all you get is a cheap knockoff machine from INDIA and you want to choose a chinese machine but sadly they will have gone the way of the taiwanese made and they the way of the dodo much like european made tools of today.
In a way what goes around comes around.

Originally Posted by BUNDYMARK

In a way what goes around comes around.

Absolutely true. In the heyday of the empire loads of cheap rubbish was exported from places like Birmingham (UK) and Manchester undercutting handmade indian products. This at a time when made in England was a guarantee of quality in tools!
We are not talking of backward countries in India and China. They are both nuclear powers and you don't put reactors together with the junk that ends up in the big B.
Cheers,
Jim

Originally Posted by derekcohen

Stop using the phrase "Made in China" and instead say "Built to Specification".

China has a million factories. They are for hire. You contract them to build something for you, and you specify exactly what you want by way of tolerances, etc. I imagine that Chinese factories can do anything that German factories can ... but with cheaper labour costs.

Blame the cheap products and the lower tolerances of tools you buy on the company that contracts the factory to build the tool at the price point they desire. It is not "Made in China" - it is "Built to Specification".

Regards from Perth

Derek

Absolutely spot on again, Derek.

I have never heard anyone complain about the quality of i-phones - always the reverse - but they are made in China. China can and does produce very high quality stuff at very competitive prices.

It also produces crap as specified by short sighted western importers and buyers. [What is the term for a "manufacturer" who no longer makes anything but subcontracts his brand name?]

It all comes down to respect. Product managers who have no respect for their customer, no respect for their product, no respect for their retailers, no respect for their colleagues careers, no respect for their brand reputation ..... and only interested in maximising their own short term bonuses.

Cheers

Graeme

Hi all: Don't post here often: most often look and learn. Anyway, last week bought a laminate trimer. Brand name: ITC. Don't need one. But. It was $16.95 Can. TWO year warranty. I can beat this thing up, I guess. 1/4 inch bits so I can do stuff on the metal lathe and.. Any way, the warranty is what sold me. Of course, made in Tawain, Wayne.

How about this point.

Even the Chinese will look for quality when they buy something.

Hi All,

I would also like to postulate the other side view on this:

For those of us on a tight budget, and with conflicting priorities, the Chinese revolution has been a godsend.

If I had equiped my workshop with premier German equipment and tools, I would probably have 4 walls and a hammer, at this point. Instead, I have a reasonably well equiped woodshop. Sure, some of the tools and machines might not be able to do everything I would like them to do, but they do a hell of a lot more than I could do without them!!!!! Where there are shortcomings, I rely on being able to compensate, by modifying, fettling etc, or just by working within the constraints imposed.

This is a mindset which goes back to my student days, and home car maintenance........

Back then, I equipped myself with "cheap crap" made in korea socket sets etc. As discussed above, this was when Korea was just emerging on the world stage, and quality was questionable.

Point being, I had a selection of equipment which allowed me to do everything I needed, at a time when a set of Gedore sockets would have been worth my annual allowance.
Furthermore, I still have those (3 I think) complete sets, 40 years later. (I have lost one ratchet).
To be fair, though, I also did take their limitations into account, and (for instance) did not try to use them with multiple extensions to remove crankshaft pulleys. For extreme jobs I bought higher spec bits as needed.
I continue to operate the same way.

regards

Originally Posted by Alastair

Hi All,

I would also like to postulate the other side view on this:

For those of us on a tight budget, and with conflicting priorities, the Chinese revolution has been a godsend.

If I had equiped my workshop with premier German equipment and tools, I would probably have 4 walls and a hammer, at this point. Instead, I have a reasonably well equiped woodshop. Sure, some of the tools and machines might not be able to do everything I would like them to do, but they do a hell of a lot more than I could do without them!!!!!

I'm not convinced by this line of thinking. What did people do in the past when there were no tool stores or machines, they bought second hand or some blades from the village blacksmith and made their own tools. It does not take long to learn how to make basic hand WW tools that are better than what you can buy in a cheap tool store and it improves your woodworking (and metal working skills) while you are at it. We'd also probably be a lot fitter and more careful and less wasteful if we just used hand tools.

The "Chinese revolution" and (just as equally to blame) our reaction to it is also going to be a major curse on our great grandkids. The whole high turnover cheap crap consumerism way of life is just unsustainable and will end up cycling minerals from our ore deposits into cheap crappy consumer goods in our landfill sites over a period of about 3 generations. And for what purpose? so we can butcher a piece of wood a few seconds faster than has been done in the past. Cheap tools are like the internet, there's a whole lot of busy work going on but I don't see a lot of quality output commensurate with the $$ being spent on cheap tools.

I've done a bit of business with Chinese manufacturer and visited many plants across Ghuangzhou and other areas. I've visited the Honda plant and the Mercedes plant where staff wore white booties and hair nets in sealed chambers making automotive mirror assemblies.

The Chinese people are biologically almost identical to you and I. Their arms and legs and fingers can do anything Johann in Bavaria can. The reasons that they predominantly produce rubbish is complex and many of them are touched on in previous posts. Mercedes and Honda use Japanese and German management to provide the systems, culture, cash and control that can allow these normal people to produce the highest quality in the world.

When buying mechanical hardware from Ghuangzhou, the manufacturer that I thought I'd been dealing with, would often just sub the work out to workshops in laneways and basements who were all making the same rubbish. There were 10,000 similar business making this rubbish in what was called lock-town and light-town. Light-town is visible from space and stretches for kilometers. All intermingled, swapping, sharing, competing, reusing, salvaging, repairing, cheating and deceiving. It was spectacular and frightening. And I was selling this undefinable and untraceable product here under one iconic Australian brand. Quality was hell to manage and getting parts that would fit last years sales was very hard.

I've been one of those in the forum knocking Chinese products, and I will still avoid their product because our industry encourages them to make rubbish and they do. Until we ask them and pay them to make Mercedes, and provide them the process engineering support and business systems to do so, I will avoid 'Made in China' where I can. I will however insist that I get my rights under the Fair Trading act in AU, so the risks partly falls to the importer and retailer.

The comment from a previous posts beautifully generalizes and sums up their current state of manufacturing ... 'sharp pointy thing that looks like a drill is not necessarily a drill' (paraphrased or mangled I think)

China is everything all at once, good bad, poor, rich, high quality, poor quality, Mercedes and Skoda.

Originally Posted by Green Beetle

China is everything all at once, good bad, poor, rich, high quality, poor quality, Mercedes and Skoda.

Yep, except that Skoda is now owned by Volkswagen and is now actually producing good quality due to the same management/QC practices you mention above.

Fair call ... I spent 3 seconds thinking of the name of a crap car, and grabbed an old punching bag not acknowledging the recent history. They still have no style! Perhaps I should have said Tatra?? Tantra?? ... that little Indian vehicle? Or Daewoo.

Scoda ... sounds like scodi ... which surely means rubbish.