On 11/5/19 4:21 AM, Rob Atkinson wrote:
My gripe is that simply bashing anything made in China is decades out of date
and a bad generalization.
Gripe all you want but you've used a few examples to try to refute a
generalization that has basis in fact. There are far too many cases
of poor products from outside US and Europe, not just China, that
disagree with your belief.
And in the US, to be honest.
I suspect that China comes in for a lot of bashing (some is justly
deserved) because of the opaqueness - a billion people running what
seems to be 10 million small shops that come and go, like mayflies -
along with a language barrier, etc.
If you are a US based customer, it's easier to find out about flaky US
suppliers - the people complaining are doing so in English, if nothing
else. Certainly there are suppliers and vendors in the US that if
someone were to come to me and say "we're going to get X from Y" I might
say "you know, you might find that Z is a better source". Someone in
China looking to contract something out in the US wouldn't have that
ability.
I'm sure that if you were Chinese and in China, you'd have a similar
experience. You'd *know* who the reputable and reliable players are, and
who to stay away from. You'd know the things to look for in their
marketing materials that indicate they're "fly by night, running an
illegal second shift in a friend's facility" - Most of us here in the US
would have no clue.
The other thing is that the incredible volume and rapidity of trade with
China on a small scale (we're not talking about container ships full of
steel - I'm talking a few cubic meters at a time, or less) has been
enabled by the Internet - Just as "no one knows that you're actually a
dog on the Internet" - you can have a very professional appearance, and
be able to deal with small orders in a relatively frictionless way, but
be totally incompetent and unreliable. In pre-internet days, vendors
like this couldn't survive - in either US or China.
You'd get your business by personal contacts, by your sales rep going
out and pounding the street, by going to trade shows and talking to
customers, etc. That's where the big mail-order vendors got started
(the Allied, the Newark, the Farnell, the Digikey) - was for small
buyers to get things without having to go through the dreaded
"distribution" (like Avnet) or "samples" where the first question was
"how many thousand parts a month will you be buying". Sure, you paid
more for DigiKey, but they are the ones who ventured out from the wilds
of Minnesota to the vendors and trade shows, and decided what to put in
the catalog and what not to carry. This is an essential intermediation
function.
The internet enabled disintermediation (i.e. cutting out the middle
man), but also put the responsibility of detecting lame suppliers on the
end user. You paid less, but you have a higher "scrap rate"
Chinese vacuum tube production is all over the place--some are great;
others flash over. Consumer products missing RFI suppression
components, and then there's steel quality which has been known to be
life threatening when used in critical structural applications. US
Gov't procurement has a whole course on how to spot knockoff hardware.
Would you go up a tower made in China with Chinese ceramic insulators?
(This is Towertalk after all.) On the other hand, smartphones from
off shore seem to have no issues. Obviously, when manufacturers
enforce QC and micromanage the process, things go well.
I don't know that mfrs "micromanage" the suppliers - it's more a matter
of "making the deal with the right supplier" - something that is
incredibly difficult to do with email from 10,000 miles away. The mfrs
who are successful have people who are local as well as significant
travel from the US, and "keep in touch".
Otherwise.....cheap ham handy talkies for $20 are the result.
And those units actually work pretty well - and are probably responsible
for more people getting involved in ham radio.
Now, if they'd just start making $50 HF radios..
I never knew anything about the QC variations in ferrite until K9YC
mentioned it.
It's actually not a QC issue - it's an inherent part of the
manufacturing process - the *design tolerance* for materials used for
EMI suppression is quite loose. It might be a manufacturing yield thing
- you could get 1% or 5% tolerance cores, but they'd be really
expensive, because they would essentially screen them post manufacturing.
The Ferroxcube (I think) doc described that it was the mechanical
finishing/grinding process that set one of the limits - it's a sintered
granular material - you can only machine to a certain tolerance.
No matter how skilled you are, and how many inspectors watch you do it,
your sand castle at the beach is never going to be mirror finish. If
you grind limestone or shell based sand really fine, and run it through
a kiln, that sand castle will have much better mechanical tolerances,
but it's not the same material as the quartz sand at the beach.
(I'm in California - beach sand is coarse, and hard, like the sea gods
meant it to be - that fluffy, cake flour-like sand in Florida or the
Caribbean is unnatural <grin>)
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