Thread: Why are there so many rubbish tools and aids on the market?

My question comes from a recent need to mark the centre accurately on the edge of a piece of timber.

So in the foolish interests of easy repeatability I dug out a forgotten major American brand centre finder, which when checked turned out like a few others I've had over the years from various sources to be out marginally over 1mm.

Near enough, you say? Not when I was doing a bit of door work and bought these various aids in the hope I could easily and quickly find the centre on the stile of a door to fit the latch. Standard 35mm door stile less 25mm latch plate = 10mm /2 = 5mm either side of the latch plate. 1mm error = 6mm one side and 4mm the other, which is a visible error and also relates to positioning the striker plate on the jamb.

How hard would it be to make this super simple tool accurately? The standard hollow door thicknesses are made to a very standard 35mm involving natural and man made timbers along with adhesives and honeycomb supports in a much more complex process with more unstable materials than firing a bit of stable plastic into a mould for a centre finding tool, which mould should be easy to make very precisely.

Another, among many, common failures is the poor indexing on mitre saws, from drop saws to sliding compound mitre saws. Some of the expensive versions have worse indexing than some of the cheaper ones.

Spirit levels are another of the many common items that aren't reliable. Go to Bunnings and test a few. I was doing that a few years ago when another bloke walked past and said derisively "Good luck with that. Let me know if you find a good one.".

Or squares. I couldn't work out why I was having problems using a major brand of speed square as a circular saw guide cutting weatherboards and the weatherboards were all slightly angled away from the plumb stops and the boards were level tested with a reliable level. Turned out that the speed square was slightly out. Maybe my fault for not checking it first, but how hard is it to make a square square when you're turning out thousands of them?

Why do companies invest big dollars in inventing and making something that with slightly more effort and precision would work perfectly, or at least very much better and to an acceptable standard?

I'm not talking about cheap rubbish on Ali Express or Temu or eBay or Amazon, but major brands sold by major retailers. Indeed, some and perhaps a lot of the cheap stuff on Ali Express etc is at least as good as and in some cases better than what the major retailers sell.