Clark Magnuson wrote:
Things made in China can be very good or so bad that a sledge hammer
cracks it's face on the first strike.

There needs to be a quality control and receiving inspection between
China and the customer to filter out the bad.

My personal anecdotes turned into seat of the pant statistics:
1) Jet 95% good, 5% crap
2) Enco 90% good, 10% crap
3) Grizzly 40% lousy, 50% crap
4) Harbor Freight 20% good, 80% crap

As a result:
1) I love my Jet tools

I'm glad somebody has good luck with them. No more for me. As I see
it, many things start as imports from China, and I assume that there is
some initial triage that sends better results to higher priced resellers
(correlation coefficient not quite 1.0 g). Some additional trim,
logos, and some spare parts of various quality appear next, and on to
the market. I have serious doubts about some of the component designs
that I have seen on Jet equipment. It started with their tenoning jig,
which misses the mark on some very simple points. More recently, the
bandsaw I didn't want to talk about at first was a Jet. The more I
study it, the worse it looks. I wrote to Jet, and was struck by the
fact that the "higher up" I reached (I will give them that much credit)
argued with me instead of listening to my advice and cautions about the
problems with their design - always a bad sign. There were some
complicated circumstances, and I got a fairly nice credit from the
reseller, making the saw quite inexpensive. I plan to run it into the
ground doing rough cuts, extending the life of the next bandsaw I buy.

As much as I don't like Home Depot (they are in fierce competition with
Lowe's to offer the worst customer service in my area), I have found
Rigid equipment to be pretty good; make that damn good. In particular,
my table saw is very well made, far better than the Jet I passed up
along the way. The arbor should be a smidge longer (with a super wide
dado stack the supplied washers will not fit), but otherwise it is a
great machine.


2) I buy all the time from Enco while throwing out 10% of what they ship

I must admit that I was impressed based on my first order. Somewhere on
the net, I got the impression they were more like Grizzly, but I am
starting to like them. J&L has been pretty good too.


3) Grizzly catalog goes straight into the recycling bin

Thanks for the validation.


4) If I am a passenger in a car that stops at HF, I wait in the car.

FWIW, they put some very good manuals on their web site, at least when
it is possible to find them =:0


Bill