Lew Hodgett wrote:
Ed Pawlowski wrote:

Price point has become more important than dependability. Anyone
working in a manufacturing world had seen this for years now.

Who do you blame? All of us. We talk how much we want quality, but
price become the deciding factor. We go to Woodcraft, fondle the
tool,
then order it from Amazon because it is $5 cheaper there. Just look
at
how well Harbor Freight is doing.

The only point I disagree with is your characterization of the $5 savings
Ed. We both know that the price differential has been far greater than
that. In fact - nobody ever made a decision based on a $5 price point.


----------------------------------------------------
During the early '60s, I worked on devices that got mounted on
the engines of military vehicles.

The performance specification was straight forward.

500 hours of performanc life with ZERO, ZIP failures.

Ok - so those same kind of specs exist today and they are met today. Your
point?


Another example of a throw away device is the printed circuit board
populated with poorest tolerance components as possible except for
a single resistor and a capacitor which are the tightest tolerance
devices available.

I'm sure you will cite some obscure reference but I've been in this industry
for too many years to listen to someone like you spout crap like this. This
is just not how engineering and manufacturing is done. Nice story line but
it really just not play in reality. To listen to stuff like this is to
believe that everything we buy or that is manufactured is done so to fail in
the shortest possible time. We have all experienced too many long lived
products to buy into that crap. Even at low price points.

This group can just get too carried away with this kind of rhetoric that is
simply unproven.



The populated boards are then tested to determine the resistor
and capacitor values to classify the board assembly as a tight
tolerance device.

From a manufacting point of view, it's the best of all worlds.

Low cost, wide tolerance components are used for at least 90%
of the of the devices while high cost, tight tolerance devices
allow a low cost, high performance boards to be delivered to
the market.

Bull.



I'm afraid the days of being able to make repairs, even simple
ones to rebuild a tool in the field are quickly becoming history
from another era.


I'm afraid there are too many tall tales like this one about what the good
old days were and what evolved over time.

--

-Mike-