Crappy Chinese Workmanship Explained

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Bedford T

Bedford T

the1chainsawguy
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cha不多

Aftermarket parts quality is not a mistake or oversight. I was reading an article from my favorite car site and they say this

There’s a concept, an attitude, in Chinese culture, called “chabuduo.” An essay in Aeon describes it as cutting corners, getting something only 70 percent done instead of 100, or as we’d say in America, “good enough for government work.” It stems in part from a DIY ethos, predominant among people who, until fairly recently, didn’t often have much but made it work.

So this crap is part of the fabric of the new capitalist China. I was kinda shocked to see it in writing, explained and it makes sense, the photo of the porch collapse is telling in that article, just part of life. China has become the land of disastrous corner cutting. Wow. The aeon article is eye popping.

god are we stupid for putting up with that crap. i read where economically they are near collapse internally, no wonder.

https://jalopnik.com/i-went-to-china-to-race-a-new-car-then-things-got-weir-1829220792
https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-about-modernity
 
I had a conversation with an engineer for a company that manufactures both in the US and China. We discussed how very high quality (think Apple, Samsung, etc.) products can be produced in China. He stated that in a factory which they control, they can maintain high levels of quality, while taking advantage of the cheaper labor rates and lower production costs. However, if they contract the work to a low bidder, or ask someone to make it 'as cheaply as possible', that't what they get: someone cutting corners at every opportunity, and a low quality product.

Philbert
 
A few cheap items ordered from one vendor was so bad it's comical. Out of five items, the fuel filters worked.

The worst was a rim socket where the center hole was off center. The chain would go from slack to tight as the crankshaft turned. I bought the parts saw off ebay, and my first thought was Oh No, It must have a bent crankshaft.
 
Well I think FarmerTec is one cut above, still messed up. They used to blame their employees when I would tell them how to fix a problem and that would enrage me. But now I see from that article it's ingrained in the people the workers and most of the companies. Wonder how the ships float and planes stay in the air. Food and meds should not be allowed in here.

Did you see the guy sitting in his apartment with a door leading to a porch that fell off? Apple, Stihl and who ever must be lucky to have a product that works it must be like supervising children

My father taught me to care, coupled that with pride and discipline and value of a job well done. That is sad that is generally missing from their society. So they see the transaction payment as the end all.

chainsaw kits and packing lists
http://thechainsawkitguy.com
http://YouTube.com/c/the1chainsawguy
 
Another factor is quality leakage, which is a Chinese game and done on purpose for the games sake. This was brought to my attention years ago. Take manufacturing tennis shoes in China for your US company. Cheap, they build sample exactly to your specification. Looks great, you order up 5000. Sell through them, order up 10,000 and the shipping costs less. Turns out they thinned the sole of your shoe by a couple millimeters. You don't even notice because your Chinese counterpart and you have a good relationship and costs, delivery were just as expected. Sell through those, and next shipment is even cheaper, weighs even less. Not only are the soles even thinner, but softer material. And the good quality laces spec'd are now nearly identical, but significantly less wearable. Also the thread used to stitch your spec'd out high quality shoe is now crap.

To a person from our culture this is not even a concept we conceptualize. We don't play that kind of games within our society. But this is an acceptable game to discuss over drinks for a chinese businessman. How you put over the foreigner.

I'd bet it is really tough to build a manufacturing workforce in China that satisfies a real entrepreneur with an honest streak.
 
Have an older JD LT160 riding mower. Not my main mower since getting a new zero turn last year, but wanted to keep the old JD running without investing too much $$$
Carb was shot.
Ordered a brand new Chinese carb off Amazon. Put it on. Total garbage. Flooding, fuel pouring out everywhere.
Sent it back.
Got another one. Put it on. Total junk, same issue flooding etc.
I should have known better than to think I was gonna get a ‘good’ carb for a JD mower for 29 bucks, but I just had to try!

Now as to the Japanese - there’s an old story goes like this.

An American company designed and made the smallest drill bit ever known to mankind. So small in fact, it could only be seen under a high powered microscope.

Being very proud of their success, they sent one over to Japan to let them see it .... thinking they’d impress them and eager to boast at how ingenious and better the American engineers were than them.

The Japanese company simply drilled a hole in that bit, and sent it back. :laugh:
 
Chinese would have made a bad copy and made a thousand and sold them all
jchipps said:
Have an older JD LT160 riding mower. Not my main mower since getting a new zero turn last year, but wanted to keep the old JD running without investing too much $$$
Carb was shot.
Ordered a brand new Chinese carb off Amazon. Put it on. Total garbage. Flooding, fuel pouring out everywhere.
Sent it back.
Got another one. Put it on. Total junk, same issue flooding etc.
I should have known better than to think I was gonna get a ‘good’ carb for a JD mower for 29 bucks, but I just had to try!

Now as to the Japanese - there’s an old story goes like this.

An American company designed and made the smallest drill bit every known to mankind. So small in fact it could only be seen under a high power microscope.

Being very proud of their success, they sent one over to a Japanese company, to let them see it .... and to kinda boast how ingenious and better the American engineers were than them.

The Japanese company simply drilled a hole in that bit, and sent it back. [emoji23]
Click to expand...

chainsaw kits and packing lists
http://thechainsawkitguy.com
http://YouTube.com/c/the1chainsawguy
 
I was the Project Manager on a large greenfield project in Banting, Malaysia where I built a $550 million dollar plant. In the middle of a damn jungle. For 2.5 years. All the while eating fishheads and rice. We had sales offices and distribution networks in the Asian realm so I am well versed in the locale.

Until you work in that part of the world and are forced to deal with the ineptness of entire populations, you have no clue as to what real frustration is. As the company I was working for was German owned, I have firsthand experience working on similar projects in Europe and S. America as well as the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The engineers that initially started working for me on the project were locals from Malaysia, Pakistan, India, China, etc. These cats wouldn't hold a candle to an engineer from US, Canada, or Europe. Inept to the core. No concept of forethought and sequential planning, advanced mechanical and electrical engineering concepts, I could go on and on.

The local welders, electricians, pipefitters, concrete workers, iron workers, etc were the most useless bunch of skilled trades personnel I've worked around.

Before I made it across the finish line, I had to bring in engineers from some of our European sites, millwrights/welders/electricians from US and EU, and hire global expats to manage the day-to-day manufacturing operation of the plant. The locals couldn't hack it. And every single company that has manufacturing in that part of the world has done the exact same thing. Expats from US, EU, and AUS are running and managing the production plants.

After the plant was built and a local management team was hired to run the operation, I was sent back a few more time to solve problems that were self inflicted. They have no concept of "fix it right", using the correct parts, insuring quality of rebuilds and repairs, or spare parts procurement and planning. I never say never, but it will be a cold day in hell before I end up on that side of the globe again.

You know that part in the movie Lone Survivor where Marcus ends up in the village? He is in that hut an asks the little boy to bring him a knife and the boy brings him a duck. Marcus says "that's not a knife, that's a f'ing duck, I need a knife".

That is Malaysia, Chine, Singapore, Indonesia all rolled up in one. It's not that they're stupid, far from it actually. They just don't have the industrialized background that we do. They are not grounded in quality equipment and having parts houses on every corner. They don't have cars, zero turn mowers, or complex machinery. They have a motorbike and live in a structure that our transients would turn their nose up at. So when their stuff breaks, they make it work, any way they know how. And they carry that mindset right into industry.
 
He is very highly regarded there. On the other hand I doubt the Chinese have ever heard of him.
 
That is the excat story I am telling. I guess when they come for us their machines will breakdown before ours so we will need to hold on. The point about their intelligence is well taken and I have seen them be highly intelligent particularly when inventing ways to get paid at our expense rather than as a reward for a job well done. Further, when they were telling me it was their employees fault I just did not understand what they were actually inferring. Amazing story. One foot out of the Stone age.
BangBang77 said:
I was the Project Manager on a large greenfield project in Banting, Malaysia where I built a $550 million dollar plant. In the middle of a damn jungle. For 2.5 years. All the while eating fishheads and rice. We had sales offices and distribution networks in the Asian realm so I am well versed in the locale.

Until you work in that part of the world and are forced to deal with the ineptness of entire populations, you have no clue as to what real frustration is. As the company I was working for was German owned, I have firsthand experience working on similar projects in Europe and S. America as well as the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The engineers that initially started working for me on the project were locals from Malaysia, Pakistan, India, China, etc. These cats wouldn't hold a candle to an engineer from US, Canada, or Europe. Inept to the core. No concept of forethought and sequential planning, advanced mechanical and electrical engineering concepts, I could go on and on.

The local welders, electricians, pipefitters, concrete workers, iron workers, etc were the most useless bunch of skilled trades personnel I've worked around.

Before I made it across the finish line, I had to bring in engineers from some of our European sites, millwrights/welders/electricians from US and EU, and hire global expats to manage the day-to-day manufacturing operation of the plant. The locals couldn't hack it. And every single company that has manufacturing in that part of the world has done the exact same thing. Expats from US, EU, and AUS are running and managing the production plants.

After the plant was built and a local management team was hired to run the operation, I was sent back a few more time to solve problems that were self inflicted. They have no concept of "fix it right", using the correct parts, insuring quality of rebuilds and repairs, or spare parts procurement and planning. I never say never, but it will be a cold day in hell before I end up on that side of the globe again.

You know that part in the movie Lone Survivor where Marcus ends up in the village? He is in that hut an asks the little boy to bring him a knife and the boy brings him a duck. Marcus says "that's not a knife, that's a f'ing duck, I need a knife".

That is Malaysia, Chine, Singapore, Indonesia all rolled up in one. It's not that they're stupid, far from it actually. They just don't have the industrialized background that we do. They are not grounded in quality equipment and having parts houses on every corner. They don't have cars, zero turn mowers, or complex machinery. They have a motorbike and live in a structure that our transients would turn their nose up at. So when their stuff breaks, they make it work, any way they know how. And they carry that mindset right into industry.
Click to expand...

chainsaw kits and packing lists
http://thechainsawkitguy.com
http://YouTube.com/c/the1chainsawguy
 
Geez Bedford T, weeks ago I posted that the Chinese quality was the result of their version of capitalism. You spent a great deal of bandwidth telling others I had no idea what I was talking about.

Hmmm.

Now it seems you have "discovered" that I was right.

Someday you will learn that not all who disagree with what you post are wrong.
 
Here’s something I just don’t understand.
You’d think they’d make ‘the product’ whatever the product might be, with at least good enough components and quality control, so that it would at least be functional when new out of the box.

For example: the carburetor I spoke of in my first post.
After seeing that the second one was also a piece of crap just like the first one, I did remove the bowl, just to try and see why it was so screwed up and flooding so badly.

Not only was the float plastic, which itself might be okay, but the entire float assembly was plastic, including the ‘tang’ that is normally metal and ‘bendable’ in most carbs in order to properly adjust the float shut off needle.

Now, due to that reason, I will never purchase another one of those Chinese carburetors.
2 pieces of garbage in a row did it for me. I’m done right.

But if they would’ve simply added another 10 bucks to the production cost, easily fixing that sub par float assembly, and even if they’d then added an additional 5 bucks to the final price on top of that, no big deal.

With that fix .... instead of the carb costing 29 bucks for a piece of trash, that most customers would never purchase again and would never reccomend to a friend etc.,
We’re now up to 44 bucks for a properly functioning carb, which is still probably 75 bucks cheaper than the oem carb, so most customers ARE still gonna buy it in a heart beat.

Seems they’d gain a much better reputation and actually make more money in the long run if they’d just spend a few bucks more to at least make a product of medium quality, that actually works .... rather than the extremely cheap product, that’s total garbage.

There are some products they do make in that ‘medium quality’ category ...... products I often refer to as being ‘a Higher Grade of Chinese junk’.
Not top notch by any means, but still very decent quality and functional.

I had zero luck on finding that ‘medium quality’ in a carb.
 
That's not the metric given. They are told 'as cheap as possible'. They rely on people buying by price, not repeat customers. To find those other guys, you have to go to a different vendor: could still be in China, but working under different guidelines.

I have heard from lots of guys who were satisfied with Chinese replacement carbs: several do not bother with rebuilding any more.

Philbert
 
It’s easy to avoid most of the headaches caused by Chinese junk. Don’t buy it. I am patient and I pay attention to where an item I’m buying comes from. In general I try to avoid all box stores. Home Depot, Lowe’s, target, bed bath and beyond. And I don’t miss them at all. I was in a Home Depot recently buying stuff for work on the schools card. I get so pi$$ed off walking around there. Try to find a straight piece of lumber, nope and they don’t carry 2”x8” and above in 10’ length only 12’ and 14’. The light fixtures are junk, don’t carry USG Sheetrock anymore and the USA made tools selection gets smaller every day.
I might pay a little more but I get better quality. Until these manufacturers stop “value engineering” and using planned obsolescence I’ll buy pre-owned or from a dealer/distributor who carries quality
 

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