Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 05:54:12 -0400
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: jack, costs - At What Cost?
In-Reply-To: <d.349dcf12.2ea3ae70@aol.com>
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Hi George --
At 07:16 10/17/2004, George Goff wrote:
>No, the Chinese are not the only ones capable of doing a number on someone
>else and I never said that.
True...
> But don't try to sidestep the issue by bringing up
>Enron and such. Instead, try telling the beleaguered US Army general who
>bought those millions of substandard berets from the Chinese that it's all
>right
>because he could have gotten screwed by someone else. Or explain that to the
>parent whose toddler is sucking on a Chinese crayon which is fraught with
>lead.
Comments to this included below...
>Let's say you go to the store to buy something, anything. And you find one
>box of this anything made in China and right beside it you find another
>made in
>Italy. C'mon, be honest, which are you going to buy?
I'm going to buy the one that has the combination of quality and price that
I'm willing to live with, just like you are.
Point is, it's not the Chinese origin that's the problem, it's the
crappiness of the particular goods in question. [Mainland-] Chinese origin
in itself *might* be a problem, but that's something no-one else has
addressed here and I'm not going to either.
We're going through a continuing process here, have been for ?centuries? --
you can't get good servants in this country because long ago the servants
decided they wanted a decent wage for what they did, and in that market
there weren't enough employers willing to pay it to sustain the
situation. And you can't get good workmanship from contractors -- but you
can, it's just that hardly anyone can afford to pay what good artisanship
costs at a rate the artisan is willing to work for. Even
comfortably-well-off people can't. Truly rich people (and corporate head
offices) can, and do, and support a small community of top-grade artisans;
but forget about the rest of us. For some reason all these folks who labor
and spin want to have vacations and VCRs and college educations and
Starbuck's bankruptcy-in-a-cup and n-hour weeks like the rest of us,
instead of living two families in a room in NYC and doing piecework by
candle-light like their ancestors did. And at least in this country we
have a lot of trouble saying why they should feel differently about it.
Stuff that was imported from Japan in the 'fifties -- a lot of it anyway --
was dreadful. Cheap in every way. Cheap enough that it sold,
apparently...but all that has changed for sure. Japan learned how to make
good stuff, and it hasn't had to -- or been able to -- compete on price
alone for a long time. I remember the first Subaru -- CU said "this is not
a car." A few years later early '70s Toyota Corollas were evil little
beasts, but unquestionably cars. And now (grumbling about foam in doors
notwithstanding) they're the benchmark for many aspects of automotive
quality. My Bentley looks like a survivor of some greasy war -- my Corolla
factory manual has several greasy fingerprints on it, they look quite
chic. Fact is I don't know where a single sensor is on that engine except
the oil pressure sender, and I only found that last month. Toyota is the
only reason I can even begin to afford a Vanagon. And I remember the
beginning of NUMMI -- everyone was fascinated to find that GM and Toyota
could build a Corolla in this country that was every bit as good as one
built in Japan. And we don't import any Japanese cheap junk any more
because it would still be expensive even if we could find any.
Taiwan -- lotta crummy stuff coming from there originally. Over '80s and
'90s it moved along; first you could find good stuff if you looked, then it
was common, then commonplace, then hard to find bad stuff (in electronics,
anyway). The crummy stuff was coming from Korea...but it's getting harder
to find now, too.
And then China...gosh, some really awful
stuff. Embarrassing. Injection-molded plastic garbage that you wonder why
they bothered, and what the people doing it must have felt like. Definite
reduction in value from the raw materials. Awful motors. Horrible tools
and machines -- but all so cheap in price you wonder how they paid for the
raw materials, let alone any labor. And LOTS of it because China is so
huge. And some of it (this really started in Taiwan, I reckon) otherwise
simply unavailable at any price outside of industry. Small lathes, rough
as cobs but you could buy one for a few hundred and clean it up. Milling
machines, drill presses, metal-cutting bandsaws -- I have my grandfather's
little 6x18 lathe, made by Atlas Press in 1941. I love it. In many ways
it's better than a Chinese 7x10 at least as it comes from the importer; in
other (important) ways (like stiffness) not nearly as good. But it's moot
because Atlas and Logan and South Bend etc basically got priced out of the
market in the '70s. And somewhere over there is the factory that keeps
pumping out thousands of "$200 bandsaws" (4x6" horizontal metal saw with a
token but improvable vertical conversion, comes in two major variations and
available with token differences from every machine-tool and industrial
supplier in the mechanized world AFAIK). The castings are good, it does
the job of cutting-off stock adequately out of the box, and it rewards
tweaking and certain upgrading handsomely. And if some poor village in the
middle of nowhere got hold of one they could rig it for foot power pretty
easily, too. It's Good Enough -- and the essential parts are perfectly
fine. Somebody over there made me a Master Precision Level (half a thou in
ten inches for one division) -- in their kitchen, no doubt. It's ugly, no,
it's hideous. I weep to look at it. But it does the job. I got a
stainless-steel .10/revolution dial caliper from the FLAPS for $18 that's
as accurate and close to as nice as an $80 Mitutoyo.
All this stuff costs one-fifth of an American equivalent, if there is one,
and it's largely because the Chinese are working for pretty close to
nothing. And learning while they do it. They're making good lathe chucks
now, for example, as good as Bison in Czechoslovakia and a good deal
cheaper. Lots of good electronics. Decent drill bits along with the
crappy ones... Pretty soon they'll be all grown up (so to say) and wanting
real wages, and the opportunity will be there for the next poor-as-dirt
country to do their apprenticeship in turn. And meantime we don't get fine
craftsmanship for next to nothing, those days are gone -- but we (can) get
minimal-adequate craftsmanship and materials for very little, and
increasingly good craftsmanship for a considerable discount. Harbor
Freight sells a great deal of stuff that's barely good enough and needs to
be nursed along a bit and coddled -- for many people and many uses that's
an excellent deal at the price. For many others it's not, of course,
nobody repealed tanstaafl. FWIW, my current feeling -- 1/20 the price most
likely pure garbage. 1/5 the price, likely to do the job with care and/or
some sweat equity. Half the price or more, quite likely good to excellent
in context.
All right, I'll shut up, and apologies for the WOB. I'll just point to
India as I go. They are great guns in software, but they seem to me to
have missed the boat somewhere in metal. In the '70s (maybe still?) they
were exporting tons of handmade brass ornamental work -- elaborate but
horrible workmanship, looks semi-ok from across the room. Lately I've
gotten some machine-tool-related stuff from there, and it's just plain
bad. A lot of it went back, and I'm not very happy about some of the stuff
I did keep. I think the Chinese Get It in some fundamental way, and the
Indians don't...about Good Enough.
david
--
David Beierl - Providence RI USA -- http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage," '85 GL "Poor Relation"
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