I had to replace the sediment bowl/petcock assembly on my 66 year old tractor. It's not a hugely complex gadget,..but it's something that might cost 50 or 60 dollars if it was American made. But from what I can determine, none of them are American made. I paid $15 for one that I found online. Every one I found was between 15 and 25 dollars and they all looked identical. I assumed that they were all made in China,..and I was correct.
It's no surprise that China is doing a lot of manufacturing these days. But it seemed fairly odd to me that somewhere in China, there's a factory manufacturing fairly obscure parts for a 66 year old tractor. If they're making parts for antique tractors,..what *aren't* they making?
They make a lot of things that we don't. They have taken over a lot of our manufacturing base a little at a time. The various government agencies regulations and union sweetheart deals with democrat administrations have made it more economical to import. China has taken over a lot of our heavy machine tooling and rebuilt it to use themselves. Stuff we can't easily re[lace. They copy anything and send the copies back here to undercut our manufacturing. Being communist they support their industry and manipulate their currency. They are taking a lions share of the stock market and many unions and people wake up eventually to find out their stock portfolios are heavily Chinese.
People like Justin Amish that have manufacturing interests in china push hard against Trump for fighting back but like it or not we're going to have to do it soon or they will overtake us. We've basically done this to ourselves and no republican president that I'm aware of has tried to do anything about it. The democrats are happy to help it along. Anything to destroy the country.
History repeats itself on a fairly regular basis. Japan bought up untold hundreds of tons of American scrap metal in the 1930's, and sent it back to us one artillery shell at a time in the 1940's. Jerry
Same here. I needed the plastic cap to the windshield washer reservoir for a 1992 Toyota pickup. Ebay for about $3 plus a little shipping. Their little chart shows that it fit my truck, so Ordered it. Whoops! China. Oh crap I thought. Well three months goes by the wrong size shows up. Fuggit. Threw it away and write it off as a loss. Never again. Bastards anyhow. They know most people won't chase them considering how long it takes and how little it costs, but it sure pisses a guy off on principle.
Only other time I ordered something from out of county it never showed up, $66.
And people want to talk about living outside the US. WTF is wrong with people?
I wish someone in China would start making brake drums for my 1989 JD 950 - JD say they no longer make them, but they will sell you one (of 4) brake shoes for this tractor for about $220.
Same here. I needed the plastic cap to the windshield washer reservoir for a 1992 Toyota pickup. Ebay for about $3 plus a little shipping. Their little chart shows that it fit my truck, so Ordered it. Whoops! China. Oh crap I thought. Well three months goes by the wrong size shows up. Fuggit. Threw it away and write it off as a loss. Never again. Bastards anyhow. They know most people won't chase them considering how long it takes and how little it costs, but it sure pisses a guy off on principle.
Only other time I ordered something from out of county it never showed up, $66.
And people want to talk about living outside the US. WTF is wrong with people?
I bought this gadget off of "Yesterday's Tractors". It hooked up just like it's supposed to. It's not that complicated of a part,..but whoever made it did a good job on the pipe threads that screw into the tank and the threads for the fuel line receptacle. There's not much else to it except for the valve that shuts the fuel off.
After draining the fuel tank (which was a bit of a nuisance) it was about a 10 minute job to remove the old piece and install the new.
Same here. I needed the plastic cap to the windshield washer reservoir for a 1992 Toyota pickup. Ebay for about $3 plus a little shipping. Their little chart shows that it fit my truck, so Ordered it. Whoops! China. Oh crap I thought. Well three months goes by the wrong size shows up. Fuggit. Threw it away and write it off as a loss. Never again. Bastards anyhow. They know most people won't chase them considering how long it takes and how little it costs, but it sure pisses a guy off on principle.
Only other time I ordered something from out of county it never showed up, $66.
And people want to talk about living outside the US. WTF is wrong with people?
You might a bit surprised how much stuff in and around your house, garage and vehicle are made in China[or elsewhere]. Don't look too close, you may freak a bit.
Same here. I needed the plastic cap to the windshield washer reservoir for a 1992 Toyota pickup. Ebay for about $3 plus a little shipping. Their little chart shows that it fit my truck, so Ordered it. Whoops! China. Oh crap I thought. Well three months goes by the wrong size shows up. Fuggit. Threw it away and write it off as a loss. Never again. Bastards anyhow. They know most people won't chase them considering how long it takes and how little it costs, but it sure pisses a guy off on principle.
Only other time I ordered something from out of county it never showed up, $66.
And people want to talk about living outside the US. WTF is wrong with people?
You might a bit surprised how much stuff in and around your house, garage and vehicle are made in China[or elsewhere]. Don't look too close, you may freak a bit.
Oh I know. I just am not going out of my way to buy anything from China. If I see it's made in China I figure it will work twice or less and probably won't work well or last at all. It's garbage.
They make a lot of things that we don't. They have taken over a lot of our manufacturing base a little at a time. The various government agencies regulations and union sweetheart deals with democrat administrations have made it more economical to import. China has taken over a lot of our heavy machine tooling and rebuilt it to use themselves. Stuff we can't easily re[lace. They copy anything and send the copies back here to undercut our manufacturing. Being communist they support their industry and manipulate their currency. They are taking a lions share of the stock market and many unions and people wake up eventually to find out their stock portfolios are heavily Chinese.
People like Justin Amish that have manufacturing interests in china push hard against Trump for fighting back but like it or not we're going to have to do it soon or they will overtake us. We've basically done this to ourselves and no republican president that I'm aware of has tried to do anything about it. The democrats are happy to help it along. Anything to destroy the country.
Should be a conflict of interest for that useless POS.
Don't get me started on all of the problems we had at the plant where I worked with the junk chink plumbing hardware and pipe purchasing was buying for us. We had to force them to source stuff from U.S. manufacturers only regardless of cost.
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.
We all agree it is out of hand. Bring back the jobs.
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 ........................
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are making the whole tractors, there are 7 billion of they trying to feed themselves !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
History repeats itself on a fairly regular basis. Japan bought up untold hundreds of tons of American scrap metal in the 1930's, and sent it back to us one artillery shell at a time in the 1940's. Jerry
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.
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...
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.
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.
In 2000 I had a consulting job for a company down in Mountain View CA. They wanted me to reverse engineer their competitor's cell tower radio amplifier. It was some crazy circuit that should not be stable. It had an NPN transistor biased on with a Voltage source. I figured out the math that showed it was possible based on bulk resistance. That company was the #3 builder of cell towers in China. Rural China got cell before they got landlines.
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 was in a bar in Hong Kong a couple of months ago and got to talking to a guy sitting next to me. He was obviously asian but spoke english with no accent, turns out he's an american born and raised in the pacific northwest to chinese parents. He said he now living in Hong Kong and was a manufacturing representative, he owned his own consulting business where he acted as an agent for U.S. companies needing stuff manufactured in China. The way he put it was that if you as an american approach the chinese to manufacture your product you're going to get ripped off, no if and or buts about it. They're going to cut corners, steal the design, and basically take your money while delivering crap. He said his value to clients was that he was ethnic chinese, spoke both languages fluently, and was able to move about freely in China. He knew how they did business and was able to ensure his client was delivered the product they were promised without getting scammed.
A big company like Apple can exercise enough control that they won't get scammed. The Iphone is built in China and is a quality product, the chinese can deliver quality but if you don't hold their feet to the fire they'll give you garbage. Apple is big enough and has the safeguards in place to keep the QC up, a smaller company might not.
Primos outdoor products is near me and I know some of the management guys. Several years ago when they started selling trail cams I got a few at cost through one of them. I wasn't impressed with them and it was hit or miss on them working, all of them have been thrown away now. The primos guys said they'd get entire shipments of cameras in from China and none of them would work, they'd have to reject the whole lot. The ones that did work initially didn't work for long and they had a very high rate of returns. That's the kind of product you get out of the Chinese if you just contract with them to design and build something with minimal or no quality assurance presence in place to hold their feet to the fire.
They can build quality stuff, but if you don't stay on top of them they're going to rip you off, that's just how the Chinese work.
I was in a bar in Hong Kong a couple of months ago
Crow hunter, you know more than me, but I have enough knowledge to beware. Those guys I dealt with in the Bay Area were always travelling to China. I was unwilling to even trave to CA, as I wanted to avoid CA state income tax.
My worst dog bite was buying an apartment building in Seattle in 1989. The seller was a Chinese national that worked at Boeing. His realtor was a Chinese national. Just to get away from those guys cost me thousands. [cheap lesson]
I was designing electronics for a company in Redmond 15 years ago. My wife was designing electronics in Everett then for a different company. We were both told we had to get the end product made in China. The quality was intolerably low and the people hard to deal with. The deals fell through [cost millions] and management found new companies in China to work with. Those deals went South too. The management told my wife she had to work with engineering in India on the phone. She says their work was worthless.
I can't help but think the problem is not just China. In the USA we have corporate structure like the military and send in the first few waves as a sacrifice.
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