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

Post WW2 we started importing a fair amount of junk from Japan and my recollection was that Americans didn't care much for junk and that enterprise fizzled. The Japs figured it out and since the mid to late '60s we've had rather robust trade with them. Don't know what the Chinks don't make, but in the broad view they do make a lot of JUNK. Got no use for their chitt and avoid it like the plague.

Dan

PS: None of my firearms are made anywhere in the orient.

Ford probably broke down the entire factory & shipped it over there for next to nothing.

Back in the hay day of offshoring, I knew engineers who's job it was to supervise the breakdown, packaging & shipment of entire factories. Somewhere in China is a transplanted American Ford tractor factory.

Not superior in any way. Their communist government is a disaster. They have a vast work force who will do any job at low wages in order to eat. Their pension plan is to have a son to care for them in their old age. When China only allowed 1 child per family, they killed all the girl babies so they could try again for a son. Now they have a huge surplus of young men with no women for them to marry.

China copies just about everything. It makes a cheap copy of a GRS Gravermax I think. It is reported to be junk and the air supply doesn't work well. so was it a bargain? Somethings they can do pretty well. Manual machine tools comes to mind but you get what you pay for. You want a cheap mill they got it but if you want a much better product they'll make it but it'll be priced accordingly.

We've allowed this to happen for years. The democrats have been in charge of congress and the presidency most of the time and they are happy to send our manufacturing base overseas. EPA! They'll regulate and tax you out of existence. Remember driving by a bakery and smelling that wonderful yeast bread? Never again thanks to the EPA that's pollution.

The Japanese sold us pure crap until the late 60's. Then they figured out that if they made products that were actually better than American made(cars for example), they would ultimately sell more.
That has worked extremely well for them. I keep waiting for the Chinese to do this but as long as we are content to buy the cheap crap they will continue with their current model.
I have seen Chinese parts that were very good quality but these were made to a reputable company's standard, in this case Honda.

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The manual machine tools from Taiwan are excellent. Many years ago Bridgeport decided to stop selling their milling machines through distributors and sell direct. One very large distributor that sold to a big part of the Eastern U.S.A. went to Taiwan and had them clone a Bridgeport milling machine with attention payed to quality. He even had them implement a few improvements. "Alliant". After a while Bridgeport realized that their direct selling wasn't going as they had hoped and approached that same distributor to again start selling Bridgeports. He turned them down.

I bought a new Alliant milling machine and it was every bit as nice as a Bridgeport,...very slick, accurate, durable machine.

China produces clones of American made machines but most of them are very crude compared to the Taiwan examples. I also bought a new Taiwan made heavy duty 16" lathe that was a beast. It weighed 4500 lbs and its entire frame was a single, one piece casting,....very strong and accurate. It wasn't a clone of an American made machine. It was the company's own design and it was a dandy.

The Chinese machines were mostly avoided by machine shops but by the time I got out of the trade, but the Taiwan made machines dominated sales. The higher grade examples are as good as any ever made and you could buy them for about 70% of their American made counterparts.

I agree that a lot of Chinese made stuff is substandard. But as with the case of my tractor gadget,..you buy Chinese or do without. There's a lot of stuff out there like that.

Harig manual surface grinders were the standard by which all others were judged for many years. I've used them quite a bit.

The Taiwan made Chevalier surface grinders probably took half of Harig's market on the smaller, manual machines. I bought one new and it's the nicest surface grinder I've ever used. Chevalier sold a bunch of these machines. I had to wait 3 weeks to get mine because every one that got unloaded was already spoken for. At that time they had trouble keeping up with demand.

All it would take is just one great leap forward and we could be a cool as China.


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That reminds me of a story one of my history teachers in HS told us. One of our pilots was hit with Japanese shrapnel, when it was removed the piece of metal said "Singer" on it. Don't know if was true or not, but no doubt there was a good deal of truth behind the story.

China and Taiwan are different creatures and have been for many decades.

What you are dealing with here is beautiful corporate win-win situation. The corporations can increase profits from cheap cost of manufacture and at the same time reduce carbon footprint in country they are based in. China does not have to worry about carbon emissions and can produce things inexpensively because labor is plentiful and energy from Russia is cheap for them to buy.

I spent some time working for a large corporation that had a big manufacturing presence in China. People that worked there were constantly flying back and forth to China.

I was talking to one of the Engineers who had spent a lot of time over there,..and he said the big reason for lack of quality control is the fact that nobody in China wants to work long term in manufacturing. They just do it long enough to accumulate enough money to buy a little patch of land to scratch a subsistence living from, then quit.

Consequently,...the manufacturing work force consists of inexperienced people who don't really care about anything except holding on long enough to get out of there.

I think that will change someday soon. If China get's to the point where a job in manufacturing provides their people with a reasonably decent quality of life, people will stay in manufacturing long enough to become skilled and produce higher quality products.

Defiantly not a rare part...they are mostly all the same...they are used on not only old tractors which there are many still in use but think of portable welders generators lawn tractors light plants man lifts air compressors..the list is endless and they mostly use a sediment bowl with a standard pipe thread...

Dilbert cartoon about dealing with China

I have had various biz dealings in my life and I usually do ok, but if I hear a Chinese accent, I am not signing anything. It seems to be a gotcha culture. Those of Chinese descent, but no accent, have always been good to deal with [ working with the same standards of transparency as me].

I have a cheap Kershaw pocket knife laying around here somewhere that is quite well made. Solid lockup, blade alignment is better than some of my Case knives, scales solidly pinned. Nice factory edge.

Chinese. With western QC, some of the Chinese stuff ain't bad at all.

I bought a $40 Kershaw folder 10 or 15 years ago. It wore out in days. I has been a basket case all these years.



I made a Teak handle for the blade yesterday.

They steal and reverse engineer a large amount of implementation in the oil and gas industry. Then sell it back to us. I worked for a large Oilfield service company back in the early 2000’s that had some well logging tools that were being phased out. When the new stuff would show up we’d take the old stuff and cut it up with a chop saw. For the express purpose of not allowing the technology to be stolen and reverse engineered.