"Brian Gaff \(Sofa\)" wrote in
:

Yes indeed, many of the brands I grew up with are just names. It first
starts with getting the stuff made abroad, then the company finds
financial issues and sells out or goes to the wall. Then if the name
is not wanted by the new company it becomes a commodity in itself.
Wharfdale, Alba, Goodmans, Bush, Murphy, indeed most of the older
names are
like that.
That is why when DVD players first appeared the one you found
everywhere
was called Warfdale.

Even Philips for most consumer stuff is just a brand name, though they
do keep some form of quality control over the output, the design and
building is by others.
A lot of companies have come out of consumer electronics and just run
their names as brands. Look at your average Sony portable radio, or
indeed Grundig, which after a brief spell with Philips is now
apparently used by other companies.

I mean, why do you think you see Polaroid TVs.

As for diy, I bought some Draper hacksaw blades made in Poland, their
teeth stripped off after not much use. Too brittle.
Brian


/I loudly agree Brian - especially in the context of White Goods and now
even Motor Cars.

I guess with Electric Cars that the real "Engineering" is undertaken by
a very specialist operation paid for by many manufacturers and may not
be know to us. Making a car (or washing machine) is done using tooling,
materials and methods mandated by "Engineering" and it should not be
possible for the location of the factory, or the day of the week or the
shift to make any difference.

I recall a guy who designed process plant telling me of a Guinness Plant
in Africa. It was commissioned and all was well. But after a few weeks
the product was going downhill. It was found that, with all the best
will, operators were tampering with the process to try and make the
Guinness even better! However some of their improvements were reacting
badly with other improvements.

Likewise - do I want to but a car where it has been necessary for worker
to use a hand tool to make something fit? Would each worker do it the
same way? What is wrong with the process that would allow a process that
is out of control?