Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The extent of Chinese manufacturing

They make all kinds of old car parts. I had to buy a replacement windshield washer reservoir for a 2005 Nissan Xterra and it was either $70 from the Nissan dealer or $15 via eBay. The plastic in the old reservoir just started to crumble, as though it was disintegrating due to UV exposure. Either way, $15 seemed like a more reasonable price for a piece of molded plastic and if it half as long as the original one, it will probably be in a junk yard somewhere.

The reality of it is; they can make it as good as we can. They can make it so cheap, that they can ship it thousands of miles & still sell it cheaper.

Is it labor cost? give me a break, a small cost in the big picture.

Cost the US mfr. has they don't;

The EPA
OSHA
product liability
Union cost
Health ins.
Life ins.
Workmans comp.
SSI
Unemployment Ins.
Retirement plans
Lawyers

And about 20 other things a third world country does not adhere to or a third world worker has the benefit of. Hell, a third world worker can't spell benefits, much less know what the word means.

Find things in the above list that if were eliminated could help a US mfr. compete ........................

If everything in your house that was made in China suddenly disappeared, you'd be standing nearly naked looking at 4 bare walls.

So, in the end, is China a superior nation?

I do not think so.

Shiite we built refineries and chemical plants with Chinese materials and engineering. Tractor parts???

I just thought it was odd that they're set up to make something as obscure as a Ford 8N sediment bowl/petcock assembly. I mean,..how big is the market for something like that? Yet they must be making them in large quantities because they're available from several different sources and they're selling them for pocket change.

How can anybody make money selling something like that for a 66 year old tractor for $15? How many 8N sediment bowl assemblies a year gets sold?

It just doesn't seem like there would be a big enough market for them for *any*body to mass produce them. And if they sell 1000 of them a year they're only going to gross $15,000 retail.

The retailers are probably not paying $5 a piece for them. So if China sells 1000 of them a year they gross $5000 for going to the trouble to crank out 1000 of them.

If you think about it, it's amazing that China has enough manufacturing capability to spend time and resources manufacturing little gadgets to repair old tractors.

If China wasn't making them, they probably wouldn't even be available.

You're thinking of it logically from our (an American) capitalistic perspective.

Humans are cheap in communist cultures. Who knows what their motivation is. Maybe they do it because they have to feed the slaves anyhow so they might as well make something as to feed them for no reason at all.

I bet the Chinese look at every old piece of every old machine and ask themselves, what can we make and sell to keep the slaves from revolting.

$13.13.

http://www.fixthatford.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=276

The Chinese probably didn't have thought to make parts for an 8N but when a company any where in the world wants x thousand widgets made these days they put it out to bid and good chance the successful bidder will be from China. So if you're a parts company here you just give them the drawings sign a deal, boom they show up several months later stamped made in China.

I don't think it works that way. You can get with a rep from China and have him give you an estimate to make a part. Considering what it is and how difficult it is to tool up and make they will make a run of xxx amount of parts for xxx amount of dollars. They ship mountains of things each day so your parts share is not that much. The parts are yours. Just like in a stamping shop. Once the dies are made it's pretty cheap to run a lot of parts but you have to order a bunch to get a discount.

Their labor is cheap and they don't have the obstacles we do in order to produce things. Add to that tort lawyers and you have a mess to deal with to do anything here. Ever notice how many safety warnings are stuck on a simple ladder? It's because some idiot, or perhaps not so dumb person, either fell off one or faked a fall and got him an ambulance chaser and sued the company that made the thing. One would think a person could climb a ladder without falling off the thing. I don't think there has been a drug made here in the past fifty years there hasn't been a class action law suit on and we wonder why they are so expensive.

Apparently global trade is the answer to our prayers. Or at least that was how it was sold to us a couple decades ago...

We had to apply our spec's, interpret them and plant our QA's folks in the shops full time. We saved money and received a good product.

My dad was cussing Slick Willie pretty hard and I admit that I didn't see it coming.

Mainland China based businesses are doing a lot of outsourcing manufacturing of goods and support services to poorer countries with cheaper labor and overhead costs nowadays, too. They were and probably still are having to bring in thousands of workers form poor remote areas of China because the more progressive big city employees with advanced educations are wanting higher and higher wages, benefits and time off so they can buy and enjoy things like new cars, vacations and other popular high dollar goods.

As to your sediment bowl and other such small parts, my guess is likely many are simply bought as separate generic "universal" pieces and then assembled as needed to meet each application.

A sediment bowl/petcock assembly for an 8N was serendipity for the Chinese as it has modern tech applications for nearly all the modern gasoline engine applications they use.

The 8N sales are a side line

Ross Perot warned us...

They are making the whole tractors, there are 7 billion of they trying to feed themselves !

66 year old tecnologie is like a lunar landing in a country that harvest kidneys from shop lifters in prison!

They make what they are asked/paid to.

Tractor parts house has a Chinese manufacturer make a run of obscure parts, the manufacture runs twice the contracted production and then undercuts the buyer on eBay.

You need something made? Call up China. They’ll make it, then fugk ya.