Your points regarding CNC manufacturing seem reasonable, but that's where
many folks are mistaken about consistency in manufacturing when current
technology is involved.
Yes, you can make a few parts accurately at your leisure, but if
feeding/housing your family depended upon you producing those parts at a
rate of 100 per hour, the picture may change.
China produces products by tonnage, not quality standards.

Epiphone guitars was an example that I mentioned earlier, and the blatently
obvious cosmetic and numerous other quality issues are being "passed" as far
as quality inspections go.

For the most part, people still do parts setups, programming and maintenance
on CNC equipment, and those areas present opportunities for inconsistent
hole locations, routing paths, sloppy fitting parts etc.

Explain the commonly experienced problem of internal threads being
oversize.. or not perpendicular to a flat surface, etc, etc.
I get it.. But those parts aren't being scrapped, instead they end up on
retail shelves every day.

Choices are made to maintain or increase production numbers, and possibly
often without the consent of the company located thousands of miles away.

Operating a large corporation by remote control is a crap shoot, and I think
most manufacturers having products made in China are beginning to realize
this.
Now they're faced with the massive investments made to move production to
China turning out to be total losses.. obviously some corporate leaders are
not willing to accept that the whole "double your money by moving production
to China" idea was an idiotic concept/decision/gamble.

So, now they're at a position of running a well-known brand name into the
ground for the last cent they can get (crash and burn), or if they have any
intentions of restoring the quality of their products and seeing continued
growth, they'll need to throw away the "excuse manual", and relocate
manufacturing elsewhere.

It's commonly stated that this learning to crawl before learning to walk
scenario has been witnessed before.
There is little in comon with post-war Japan's "imagined" gradual
improvements in manufacturing quality (which you may not be familiar with
because you didn't grow up here in the US).. and what's taking place in
China today.

Deluded folks were saying 10-15 years ago that China's product quallity will
improve just like Japan's did.. bull****.
There is essentially no comparison, since 50 years ago the overall quality
of most goods was much higher than in recent years.
We've been accepting the throw-away goods based class of consumerism for a
couple of generations now, in the race to the bottom of quality, But low
prices.

I don't see a problem with China (India, other) producing goods for
Wham-mart and dollar stores.. and that's exactly what was done initially
with toys and low quality goods from Japan in the 50s and 60s.
But relying on China's ability to improvise their cunning methods of making
a product cheaper has proven to destroy the minimally acceptable
expectations of quality.

Consumers are slow to catch on, mostly oblivious and blinded by cheap
prices.

Corporate execs and managers can see the writing on the wall if they aren't
in denial.. when profits drop due to a 20+% product return rate of buyers
returning defective products/lost sales, unacceptable ratio of
marketing/advertising expenses to sales profits, etc.. they will feel the
pressure to make changes in previous decisions which led them to the place
they are today/tomorrow.. or they might just get replaced with another
like-minded doofus who continues to make the same mistakes which end up
killing the company.

Trouble is, then we have job losses here in the US and elsewhere.. but not
in China where they shift production to a counterfeit product or some other
POS, which can take place, essentially overnight.
Not only corporate job losses, but in retail store jobs, truck drivers, on
n'on down the chain.

That wasn't a potential problem in the 1950s with post-war Japan products.
For one reason, because companies like RCA Victor still had a full product
line of other domestically-produced goods, and the products made under
license from RCA in Japan, were merely supplemental products in their
overall number of goods.

I think that Japan's growth and reconstruction were being aided by numerous
foreign entities, but largely by American assistance.. not corporate welfare
as it's done today with a few execs getting multi-million bonuses (or the
Marcos in the Phillipines), but trade agreements that led to substantial
growth in production and technological advancements.
It didn't take Japan 50 years to reach world-class quality levels, instead,
it took the rest of the world a long time to accept that Japanese quality
matched and exceeded any precision product from Germany, Switzerland, USA
etc.

Almost no one learns anything.. oh, I already said that.

You can bet that these factors aren't being taught to the twenty-x year old
MBAs and future corporate leaders.

I have some early products of Japan made for export, and the consistent
quality is obvious, manufactured on manual machines, made to accurate
precision tolerances.
It seems that if there were defective or low quality parts made, which
didn't meet acceptable quality, they were probably scrapped.. not packaged
and packed into a shipping container headed to the USA.

It's not my belief that China can't make quality goods (CPUs aren't a
trivial product), and I haven't said that.. not even in years past.

My metalworking machines being the major exception, I typically don't buy
products that need to be repaired, but with my machines, I didn't have
unrealistic expectations of what I was getting for the price.
My new 9x20 lathe was $600 delivered.

I'm not willing to buy a $600 product that fails within weeks or months and
can't be repaired because sophisticated replacement parts aren't available
or the fabrication techniques can't be duplicated manually (massive ICs
requiring specialized equipment to replace them, components bonded to a
large circuit board with epoxy).

So, my equpiment purchases are often made from the trailing edge of
technology.. stuff that can still be repaired even if I have to make a new
part on my machines.

I'm not particularly cheap or poor, but there's a limit to how much I'll pay
for present day throw-away technology.

I'll leave the spreading landfill aspect rest, but the issue of scrap
cardboard is an export commodity now, speaks volumes.

--
WB
..........


"Ignoramus2617" wrote in message
...
On 2012-03-07, Wild_Bill wrote:
I happen to believe that the writing is on the wall, and it should be
crystal clear by now.. but I also believe that almost no one learns
anything.

Any product that needs to be built right, can't/shouldn't/won't be built
in
China.

As far as I know, the Chinese are perfectly capable of making good
products, or shoddy products, depending on what they are asked to do.
Very often they asked to make shoddy products.

I mean, with CNC equipment and generally modern production methods,
there is no problem in making products made to the exact spec,
consistently. If I program my machine to make a 0.237" flat and a 7mm
keyway, turn the part 31.92 degrees and do the same thing again, the
machine will do exactly that, regardless of where it is located, China
or the US.

In China, though, I can dump used coolant near my front door, treat my
employees like ****, and cheat on trademarks, something that is not
possible here.

i