China is taking the fun out of my hobby.

Tom1200 said:

In reply to 03Panther :

We are in agreement about the Chinese government's total lack of ethics.

As for the consumers fault I'm not sure fault is the right word. People want cheap goods, someone in business will oblige. What we got is cheaply made goods at a low price, that's the issue we are really talking about.

As I see it, US sellers of the products made in any cheap country are complicit in the lack of enforcement of any laws to enforce copy rules.  They will complain all day long, and pretend that it matters- but they know if the pot is stirred, the source of super cheap labor goes away.

Way back in the early days of partnerships, China required a Chinese company team up with the US company to share information and technology.  This was to boost the Chinese company, of course.  Lots of lots of complaints, but nobody did a darned thing to prevent the technology transfer- so that the cheap labor and shipping could be taken advantage of.

Complain all you want about China, but US companies are as much to blame in just accepting the requirements instead of negotiating a lot better.  

Given the growth of Japanese engineering, I'm quite sure that China copied Japan in this respect.  As has South Korea.   Look closely- everything each of those countries are now the best in the world at started here in the US.  

Also, note that that same consumer likely owns stock in one or more of the companies profiting from this

That's great for the consumer. Considering "consumer level investors" we'll call them, meaning average Joes with a Vanguard or fidelity account only own about 9% of publicly traded shares of the stock market, it's really working out for them to be paying more for less to get a slice of the dividend pie.

In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :

Minimum RA?! That's a new one for me. My favorite anecdote is when I had to defend one of our suppliers from the leadership of a well-known Japanese automotive/aviation company. They were adamant about a "no merged/intersecting holes" requirement on a part that had over 100,000 .010" dia. laser drilled holes in it. This was a sheet metal part maybe .150" in thickness and the angles of the holes meant they were often over 1" long. The x-ray images looked like Swiss cheese. While I sympathized with the requirement they simply couldn't understand there was no way to realistically meet it in a production environment. It got so bad my company almost launched a covert redesign of the part behind the Japanese company's back (it was a joint venture thing). To this day I don't know how exactly we got around this but I think it involved the observation that I'd be retired and most them would be dead before the First Article Inspection was completed if they didn't budge.

alfadriver said:

Given the growth of Japanese engineering, I'm quite sure that China copied Japan in this respect.  As has South Korea.   Look closely- everything each of those countries are now the best in the world at started here in the US.  

Curious, what are the things each of those countries are the best at?

In reply to Mr. Peabody :

Japan- cars, S Korea- electronics, China- solar and electronics.  

Hopefully soon, some of the highest tech of electronics will be made, again, here in the US- but the more state of the art chip making is in Asia right now.

edit- forgot that China also leads the world in lithium batteries.  While there are plants being made, many of the various Li batteries come from China.  The quality is variable in the lower cost segment, but I keep seeing that get tightened up.

This thread is crazy to me.  OE parts are available for most vehicles, especially domestic trucks.  Yes, they're more expensive.  Yes, occasionally they fail but in most cases they've been through rigorous durability testing by the manufacturer and have been iteratively improved over the life of the vehicle, unlike parts store stuff.  If you want the good stuff you have to pay for it, same as always.  To me it's crazy to buy something like a starter or an alternator, which is actually an assembly of many other smaller components and requires skilled assembly, from a parts store.  Play with fire and you're bound to get burned.  I don't see what any of this has to do with China at all.

In reply to ShinnyGroove (Forum Supporter) :

Its where the majority of the fire people are playing with is made.

Got it.  In that case, I blame Italy and Mexico for the 20 pounds I put on during COVID.

ddavidv said:

STM317 said:

This doesn't sound like China's fault to me. This is corporations sacrificing quality to maintain or increase profit at a given price point.

Or more accurately, corporations shifting to offshore to remain competitive because if they don't China will just make it on their own and dump it here. They have no qualms about stealing designs and making copies of anything. Either play with them or try to win against them.

I love these threads. The horse left the barn decades ago, folks. There's lots of blame to go around:  workers, unions, environmentalists, politicians and yes, even the Evil Corporations.

You can thank Amazon for enabling this sort of behavior too WRT knock-off products being sold as legit pieces. 

logdog (Forum Supporter) said:

bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) said:

This afternoon the starter bendix is hung up and would not retract. Its going to have to come off again.

I have had very good luck with the Tuff Stuff alternators and starters actually lasting.  They are built in USA. Currently both the van and MustangII have TuffStuff alternators.

Summit Linky

 

Thank you for the link to a perfect example of the problem. That starter is actually remarkably similar to the AC Delco we are having trouble with. I am an importer and one of the things I waste my time doing is tracking my competition. I want to know where their products are made, how many they sell, and to whom. I do not have time to go through this process while replacing a starter on a Sunday, but for fun I looked up the manufacturing info for the "Tuff Stuff, made in the USA". First thing I noticed is that their only listed address does not show a building nearly large enough for a manufacturer of a full line of automotive components. The building does say Hearst on the front which is the name of the brothers who own the company. So I plugged the company name into import records. I got nothing so I searched the address and found the business name is actually Hurst Auto Truck Electric. When I plugged that into import records I got this:

Interesting. Lots of Asian companies they do business with. 392 containers imported since 2006. 

Lets look at what Unipoint Electric does:

I went to their website and they make starters. And a bunch of stuff for Autozone. 

I am told that if the dollar value of work done on a product in one country is higher than the dollar value in another country then it is considered to be "made" in the country with the biggest investment. So take a starter manufactured in China with components costing 15 dollars, by a worker who is paid 4 dollars for his time. Toss it in a box with 100 other starters and send it to Hurst Auto Truck Electric. A guy pulls it out of the box, bench tests it (maybe), plastic wraps it, adds the product specific nuts or other parts, boxes it and labels it. The US dollar cost for the box and small bits is 5 dollars, shop overhead is 10 dollars and the worker gets 5 dollars. The US side did nothing in the way of manufacturing but claimed a dollar higher in costs so now it is made in the USA.

thanks for digging into that.....

Bosch probably ( I hope ) has higher specs for starters than Autozone does , 

Unipoint Electric  will build to a price point  ,  how much do you want to spend ?

alfadriver said:

Complain all you want about China, but US companies are as much to blame in just accepting the requirements instead of negotiating a lot better.  

This is exactly the issue; US companies were eeking out more profit and were to short sited to see or care about what the long term result would be. So I don't mean to off way of topic but when you have CEOs total pay predicated on the stock price and they only have 3-5 year contracts this is what happens. That 3-5% gain in short term is great but 15 years later it may come back to bite you.

Additionally the Chinese Government did an excellent job of making business profitable for various politicians and corporate officials. I've been a buyer since 1989 and even back then you could see this coming, again as it was profitable for the people that mattered/control things no one spoke up. 

ShinnyGroove (Forum Supporter) said:

This thread is crazy to me.  OE parts are available for most vehicles, especially domestic trucks. 

Tell that to a Ford owner; they sunset parts availability with astonishing speed. I swear there was a post here about someone looking for a part for a 2008 Ford truck and the OE new part was NLA. (No Longer Available)

dculberson said:

ShinnyGroove (Forum Supporter) said:

This thread is crazy to me.  OE parts are available for most vehicles, especially domestic trucks. 

Tell that to a Ford owner; they sunset parts availability with astonishing speed. I swear there was a post here about someone looking for a part for a 2008 Ford truck and the OE new part was NLA. (No Longer Available)

Not to threadjack, but IMO this is actually worse than the whole China "quality" problem.  With my beater, i'm pretty much forced to source new parts from offshore, China, Taiwan, UK, Australia or wherever.  Most if not all factory parts are NLA and have been for sometime.  And 91 Infiniti G20's (Nissan Primera) aren't exactly plentiful in the junkyards. 

In reply to bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) :

I will allow that one can order forged crankshafts from China, do some final machining (necessary anyway, to prevent knockoff syndrome) and label it "Made in USA".  The forging is raw materials, you see.

I was told at one point (possibly no longer, possibly still) that all aftermarket forged cranks are Chinese in origin.  There are no small facilities for forging in the US.

I think much of this thread is the typical China bashing that is so in vogue. Yes they were a big part of what got the lowest of low price trend moving, but almost everyone has embraced the philosophy in most product categories. The vast majority of major appliances are made domestically because they're heavy and lower priced. They're designed to fail very quickly. The steel rusts prematurely because they're trying to save a fraction of a cent on lower carbon, lower nickel steel, just like chinesium.

Domestic car manufacturers built garbage for a long time. Cars last more than twice as long today as in the 70s. For most other products categories the opposite has happened.  The level of engineering in today's cars is so much higher. It rose because Japanese manufacturers forced everyone to raise their game. Drive a GM product from the early to mid 2000s, when it was 3-5 years old and tell me they didn't rip off their customers.

bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) said:

I now know that Bosch is owned by a Chinese coal mining company, for the record.

Citation?

And another vote for OEM Honda. I'm about to order a set of weird body-panel-with-weather-stripping-included parts for my 30 year old Acura. It's expensive, but available, and of the same quality it was in 1992. 

I bought British sports cars  in the 60's.  Lucas had several levels of parts. Some levels went into Rolls Royce. Aston Martin, Jaguar. 
 Some went into cheap British Sedans and other  cheap cars.  I found out how to decode  country of origin  At first parts from India were absolute junk.  By the 70's they were actually better than the British parts.  In the 90's some parts came from Ireland while others came from Vietnam. 
  My point is we all want low prices. But those low prices come at a cost and usually that cost is the quality.  
   Right now some of the best parts for Ford Flatheads come from China.  The quality of Chinese made Turbo's has been steadily improving.  But a smaller sized turbo at slightly over $100 doesn't have much room for improvement. 
 

  I remember when made in Japan was a slur. Now some of the finest things are made there. 
Just like Made in America was once pure junk to the British. 

So we are all in agreement that the goal of big quarterly profits gutted manufacturing in the US?  This drove the business model towards building substandard parts out of the US.  Take a Peterbilt truck as an example.  Every since part on them was made, built and assembled in the US at one time.  Now they are "assembled" here only.  This is why lots of truckers just buy or rebuild the power train in their old Peterbilt 359s.  
 

So we are also in agreement this isn't the OPs or consumer's fault?  A big part of the problem is our US business model is flatter wages, rampant inflation, and increased profits for 0.1%.  Even the 1% isn't doing so hot these days.  
 

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

So we are also in agreement this isn't the OPs or consumer's fault?  A big part of the problem is our US business model is flatter wages, rampant inflation, and increased profits for 0.1%.  Even the 1% isn't doing so hot these days.  
 

 

I think for the most part we can agree. As for consumers , yes we were baited but we still took the bait. 

If it were not so easy to replace the starter in my wife's truck, I would buy one at the dealership.

My best friend will not put any rebuilt starters on his Hondas.  Tried three in a row that did not work for various reasons, then went to the dealership, paid double and has had no trouble since.

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

So we are all in agreement that the goal of big quarterly profits gutted manufacturing in the US?
 

So we are also in agreement this isn't the OPs or consumer's fault?  A big part of the problem is our US business model is flatter wages, rampant inflation, and increased profits for 0.1%.  Even the 1% isn't doing so hot these days.

Most manufacturing jobs were lost to automation. Read up on the topic. Some of the manufacturing jobs that went to China were lost when their wages were cheaper than automation. Some of those have since been automated. Rampant inflation prior to 2021?

My neighbor worked for a big 3 automaker. His job took half a day to do, so he'd leave, have someone else clock him out and work for his own business for the afternoon. Guys like him were earning top 5% income jobs doing bottom quartile skillset work. He has a sweet defined benefit pension based on that fraud. That's ONE of the things that happened.

A lot of smaller manufacturing facilities now have a very small number of employees and a whole lot of capital investment.

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

So we are all in agreement that the goal of big quarterly profits gutted manufacturing in the US? 

Nope.

In reply to ProDarwin :

But they can make more money in the short term by selling off US based assets and "downsizing" workers, which increases stock value.  To get product, they offshore.  Or just let the company die, shrug into their golden parachute, and do it again to another once-profitable company.

For starters and alternators if you want a quality repair IMO it's like this

1st choice: Take your original to competent local rebuilder. They take pride in their work, and use quality parts. Our local guy (10 years ago) averaged around $100 per unit for cars and light trucks.

2nd choice: A parts place with bankers hours, be it a dealership, napa, carquest, etc. These guys do the bulk of their business selling to shops, not DIYers. Shops dont want the cheapest parts. Those parts aren't cheap when you have to do the job over for free, and piss off a good customer.